Why Do I Smell Strawberries

What causes olfactory hallucinations (phantosmia)? – Answer From Jonathan Graff-Radford, M.D. An olfactory hallucination (phantosmia) makes you detect smells that aren’t really there in your environment. The odors you notice in phantosmia are different from person to person and may be foul or pleasant.

You may notice the smells in one or both nostrils.
The phantom smell may seem to always be there or it may come and go.
Phantosmia may be caused by a head injury or upper respiratory infection.
It can also be caused by aging, trauma, temporal lobe seizures, inflamed sinuses, brain tumors, certain medications and Parkinson’s disease.

Phantosmia can also result from COVID-19 infection. Talk to your health care provider if you have symptoms of phantosmia, so that they can rule out any serious underlying disorders that may be causing olfactory hallucination. Parosmia is another smell disorder that’s similar to phantosmia.

Contents

0.1 Why does it smell like strawberries in my room?

1 Why do I smell like berries?
2 Why do I smell fruits?
3 What are common Covid smells?
- 3.1 What kind of brain tumor causes phantosmia?
- 3.2 Are phantom smells a symptom of Covid?
4 What bacteria smells like strawberries?
- - 4.0.1 What gas smells like strawberries?
5 What is the strawberry aroma called?
- - 5.0.1 What bacteria has a strawberry smell?
6 Can mold smell like strawberries?
- - 6.0.1 Is smelling like strawberries attractive?
- 6.1 What causes the smell of fruit?

Why does it smell like strawberries in my room?

It could be hidden under something because it fell or someone forgot they put it there. The heat could be amplifying the smell of the strawberry. Is your window open? Strawberries could be outside somewhere and the smell has drifted along with the wind and entered the room.

Why do I smell like berries?

A fruity odor to the breath is a sign of ketoacidosis, which may occur in diabetes. It is a potentially life-threatening condition.

What does it mean when you smell something sweet?

The Culprit: Diabetic Ketoacidosis – Fruity-scented sweat (or breath or urine) could be a sign of a serious complication of diabetes called diabetic ketoacidosis “This occurs in individuals with diabetes, mostly type 1, if blood glucose levels are not managed,” Dr.

Excessive thirst Frequent urination Nausea and vomiting Stomach pain Weakness or fatigue Shortness of breath Confusion

‌ Fix it: ‌ If you have any of the above signs of diabetic ketoacidosis, seek medical treatment immediately. This condition must be urgently treated with insulin and intravenous fluids, Dr. Adimoolam-Gupta says. Left unchecked, diabetic ketoacidosis can result in a coma or even death.

Why do I smell fruit in my nose?

Phantosmia vs. parosmia: What’s the difference? – Phantosmia is when you detect smells that aren’t there, while parosmia refers to a distorted sense of smell. These conditions share many of the same causes. Like phantosmia, parosmia treatment depends on the underlying cause.

What chemical smells like strawberries?

Furaneol is a natural compound with oxygen atoms in ketone, hydroxyl, and ether functional groups. It is associated primarily with the odor of strawberries, but it is also found in food crops as diverse as pineapple, tomato, and buckwheat. Furaneol contains an asymmetric carbon atom and therefore exists as two enantiomers.

Why does my room smell fruity?

8. Air Conditioning Leakage – If your air conditioner starts to leak, then it produces a sweet smell in the house. It could be due to dirty air filters, clogged condensate drain lines, damaged or rusty drain pan, broken condensate pump, or incorrect installation.

Why do I smell like old fruit?

Smelling Sickness Body Odor May Be Sign of Disease Did anyone ever tell you that you smell bad? Funky breath or stinky underarms can happen to anyone, at any age. Whether or not you’ve noticed them, some body odors can signal a health problem. But most breath and body odors are normal.

Bad breath is most often caused by bacteria on the teeth and tongue,” explains Dr.
Madeleine S.
Deming, an internal medicine expert at the NIH Clinical Center.
It’s normal if your breath smells a little in the morning, especially if you slept with your mouth open.
A dry mouth allows bacteria to thrive.

Bacteria that live in the mouth can make compounds that have sulfur. These compounds are especially stinky. They can smell like rotten eggs or onion, for example. If bad breath isn’t cleared up by brushing your teeth or using mouthwash, it may be a sign of another issue.

Over time, bacteria can cause tooth decay and gum disease.
Decay and gum disease do not smell good.
Both require a trip to the dentist for treatment.
Other causes of foul breath odor may be sinus, throat, or lung infections.
These need to be treated by a health care professional, too.
Your breath can also carry clues of disease from other parts of your body.

That’s because you exhale more than just air. Your breath also contains gassy compounds that move from your organs through the bloodstream into your lungs. Breath that smells fruity or like rotten apples, for example, can be a sign of diabetes that’s not under control.

Rarely, people can have bad breath because of organ failure.
A person with kidney failure may have breath that smells like ammonia or urine.
Serious liver disease can make breath smell musty or like garlic and rotten eggs.
Compounds that are transported through the blood can also be released through your sweat glands.

That can make your armpits and skin smell bad. It’s normal for stress to cause smelly compounds to be released through your sweat. But your armpits can smell for other reasons too. Both moisture and hair enable bacteria to thrive. These bacteria can make smelly compounds.

Bathing, shaving, and deodorant can help keep these odors in check.
Because certain diseases cause breath or body odors, NIH-supported researchers are developing an electronic “nose” to help doctors detect them.
This research is at an early stage.
In the lab, scientists can already analyze odor compounds from the body.

They’ve even trained dogs to detect signs of certain cancers in breath samples. If you’re concerned about a new or worsening body odor, “a trip to the doctor for evaluation is always the first step,” Deming advises. “Bad breath is best assessed by a dentist.” Your dentist can examine your mouth for signs of trouble.

If body odor is your concern, your doctor can conduct a physical exam. If needed, your doctor can suggest further tests. “A trial of avoiding foods that are known to cause body odor may be considered. In rare cases of body odor due to an underlying medical condition, the treatment of that condition may help to manage the odor as well,” Deming says.

See the Wise Choices box for some ways to prevent strong breath and body odors. : Smelling Sickness

Why does my bed smell sweet?

Bed bugs in abundance can reveal themselves by the “sweet” scent they exude. Does your bedroom have a particular smell? Here’s how to know if you have creepy crawlies hiding in your sheets. These little creatures use an anaesthetic in their saliva to bite people without being detected.

Although they’re more drawn to the head and neck, they’ll attack any area of exposed skin.
Notoriously difficult to control, they have a defence mechanism they engage when under threat.
Other signs of bed bugs include dark bloodstains on the sheets and bedding, where they’ve sneakily attacked you.
Your skin may be itchy and irritated from the bites.

If you have sensitive skin, you may have painful swelling after being bitten. Another sign to look out for is small brown spots on the bedding, where you may have crushed some in your sleep. The small insects aren’t restricted to the bedroom, they can also live on furniture.

DON’T MISS Typically dark yellow, red or brown, adults are only 5mm long – but still big enough to be detected by sight. Yet, the escapists can hide on bed frames, mattresses, clothing, furniture, behind pictures and under loose wallpaper. While addressing the bed bug problem, bites can be treated with a cool compress, such as a clean, damp cloth.

Do try to avoid scratching the bites to prevent an infection. If the itch is very intense, try antihistamines to reduce the severity of the itch. Getting rid of bed bugs is no easy task. Due to their elusiveness, it’s best to contact professional bed bug removers.

Either contact the local council or pest control services, as the pest buggers can also be resistant to shop-bought insecticides.
Any affected bedding and clothing need to go on a hot wash at 60C, or you can tumble dry on a hot setting for a minimum of 30 minutes.
An alternative method is to put the affected clothing and bedding in a plastic bag and put it in a freezer (-16C or colder) for four days.

You might be interested: How To Grow Sweet Strawberries

Bed bugs don’t care if the house is clean and tidy, or messy and dirty, but keeping a clean home will ensure you notice them much more quickly. The NHS advises people to not keep clutter around the bed, and not to bring in secondhand furniture indoors without carefully checking it first.

Why do I smell fruits?

Why does my sweat smell bad? – There can be several reasons your sweat smells bad. For example, certain medications, supplements or foods can make your sweat smell bad. Remember, the sweat itself isn’t what smells; it’s the bacteria on your skin combined with the sweat. Several medical conditions and diseases are associated with changes in a person’s usual body scent:

Diabetes, Gout, Menopause Overactive thyroid, Liver disease, Kidney disease, Infectious diseases,

If you have diabetes, a change in body odor could be a sign of diabetes-related ketoacidosis, High ketone levels cause your blood to become acidic and your body odor to be fruity. In the case of liver or kidney disease, your odor may give off a bleach-like smell due to toxin buildup in your body.

Can mold smell like strawberries?

Get this: Fungus can make trash smell like strawberries You might not think of mushrooms as great cooks. But fungi, as it happens, could be a wonderful way to make flavors. By using fungal enzymes to transform other biological material, it’s possible to create some rather pleasant aromas.

Scientists have found a way to generate a potent wild strawberry scent by allowing one particular fungus to work on the pulp, seeds, and skin of black currants, a type of berry commonly grown in Europe.
They their results on November 17 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry,
Their motivation was to cheaply reuse agricultural waste, converting it into “natural flavors in a highly sustainable way,” says, a food scientist at the Institute of Food Chemistry and Food Biotechnology at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Hesse, Germany, and one of the researchers.

A few examples of scent-making fungus already exist: yeast, for instance, to make phenylethanol-2, a chemical with a rose aroma. Zorn and his colleagues had previously used a different fungus to create coconut and mint scents. And although they aren’t fungi, certain bacteria to mass-produce vanillin, which forms the base of vanilla extract.

But, so far, the group of fungi Zorn and his colleagues are exploring—which includes mushrooms and other so-called higher fungi—haven’t been commonly used.
To help change that, the researchers grew several hundred different fungal strains on a particular sort of agricultural waste.
When fruits such as black currants are pressed into juice, the process leaves behind a medley of pulp, seeds, and skin called pomace.

This agricultural waste is rich in fiber, proteins, and sugars, all of which provide ample fuel for fungi to ferment. Fruit producers tend to view pomace as scrap material, so it’s frequently turned into animal feed or biogas—that is, if it isn’t disposed of entirely.

Once the fungi developed, the scientists used a well-proven way to judge aromas from the fermented material.
We just smelled the plates to see what kind of flavour develops,” says Zorn.
A panel of PhD students and postdocs, whose noses were trained by weekly seminars to recognize and describe different flavors, tested the scents.

Different fungi created different aromas—fruity, herbal, tropical, malty, musty, and metallic. “For some, it was really ugly,” says Zorn, “and for some, we detected a highly pleasant and appreciable flavor.” One of those plates seemed to emit a sweet strawberry smell.

Growing on the plate was Wolfiporia cocos, an edible fungus found on wood in forests.
This fungus is known to practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, can calm the mind and promote urination.
The scientists’ next step was to identify the compounds that caused the strawberry scent.
When you smell a scent, you’re really smelling a combination of specific molecules, or compounds, with obscure names such as (R)-linalool, methyl anthranilate, geraniol and 2-aminobenzaldehyde.

All four of these are found in wild strawberries, and all four were identified by the scent-judges. Then, the researchers used artificial versions of those four compounds, combining them into a completely artificial scent. They passed that cocktail back to the smelling panel, who judged it to be very similar to the strawberry aroma from the fungal medley.

Sustainably creating a wild strawberry scent is useful, because although wild strawberries have an odor and flavor that’s more concentrated and more potent than their domesticated counterparts, an individual wild strawberry is small. It doesn’t contain many aromatic compounds. Real wild strawberries are also hard to find in their forest homes.

“As far as I’m aware, there is no alternative biotechnological route that’s commercialized” to create the scent of wild strawberries, says Zorn. Zorn says that they’ve patented the result, which has been acquired by a company that plans to scale it up for mass-production: a necessary step to get this into food.

Why am I smelling foods that aren’t there?

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Smelling things that aren’t there is called phantosmia. It can be unpleasant and affect how things taste. But it isn’t usually serious and may go away by itself in a few weeks or months. See your GP if the strange smell doesn’t go away in a few weeks.

Can anxiety cause phantom smells?

Unusual Symptoms of Anxiety and What to do About Them Apr 03, 2019 10:00AM ● By WLMagazine by Kimberly Blaker Imagine, out of the blue you feel your brain spin 180 degrees at lightning speed as if fueled by an electrical current. This bizarre feeling isn’t lightheadedness, dizziness, or anything you’ve ever experienced. You panic and wonder, ‘Am I going crazy?’ Or worse, ‘Am I going to die?’ You try to brush it off when suddenly, it happens again.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in five Americans will experience an anxiety disorder in a given year.
There are over 100 possible symptoms, many of which you’d never expect to be caused by anxiety.
For that reason, when they occur, they often exacerbate anxiety because of the worry the symptoms cause.

The following are some of the more bizarre symptoms of anxiety, though most are not uncommon. If you experience symptoms that persist, seek medical attention to rule out a medical cause since all the symptoms of anxiety can also be associated with various medical conditions.

Indigestion Anxiety can cause temporary or even chronic indigestion.
Burping, passing gas, diarrhea, and heartburn can all be symptoms of anxiety.
Phantom Ringing Tinnitus, which is a ringing in the ears, can be a sign of stress or anxiety and can be experienced in several ways.
According to anxietycentre.com, you may hear buzzing, ringing, humming, whizzing, chirping, roaring, swooshing, or any number of other sounds.

Burning Sensation This unusual anxiety symptom can be felt on your skin, lips, tongue, and even in your eyes. It can feel like a sunburn despite no sunburn being present, a prickling sensation, or even shooting sparks. “There are over 100 possible symptoms, many of which you’d never expect to be caused by anxiety.” Heart Irregularities Skipped heartbeats, palpitations, or a racing heart can all be symptoms of anxiety.

What’s so troublesome is that it can be difficult to tell the difference between heart irregularities caused by anxiety versus a heart attack.
When in doubt, seek medical treatment right away.
Numbness or Tingling These feelings can occur in your hands, feet, arms, legs, or face.
It can also be felt as physical weakness.

Excessive Yawning During anxiety attacks, hyperventilation is a common response leading your body to feel it isn’t getting enough oxygen. As a result, you might experience frequent yawning. Phantom Smell Phantosmia, which is an olfactory hallucination, sometimes occurs with anxiety.

It can cause you to smell something that isn’t there, or rather, a neutral smell becomes unpleasant. Brain Shivers Most often, this bizarre sensation is caused by antidepressants or withdrawal from them. However, sometimes it’s associated with anxiety. Brain shivers can range from mild to severe and feel different from person-to-person, though they usually last only a brief time.

“Brain shivers or zaps,” explains anxietycentre.com, “can feel like an electrical jolt or a shaking, vibration or tremor in the brain.” Phantom Vibrations If you’ve ever felt your phone vibrate, only to discover it didn’t, it could be caused by attachment anxiety.

This is a very real phenomenon, according to a study reported by the University of Michigan in 2016. Tremors Numerous types of tremors can be caused by anxiety. In addition to shaking or trembling, other typical forms, according to calmclinic.com, include arm or leg spasms, cramping, or longer or slower shaking than usual.

Derealization This is a feeling of not being in reality. Anxietybc.com says this can be experienced in several ways. You may feel disconnected from the world and people around you, sort of like being in a dream state. Your perception of space, time, and the size of things may be distorted.

You might be interested: Readers ask: How To Make Blueberry Balsamic Vinegar?

Everything might feel foggy or fuzzy or that you’re very ill or going crazy. Globus With this anxiety symptom, it feels like a lump in your throat, or you might have difficulty swallowing. Some people also feel a tightness in their throat. “During periods of high stress, get plenty of rest. This will help keep anxiety under control and result in fewer or less severe symptoms.” Eye Problems Blurred vision, dilated pupils, watery eyes, and shapes that float in front of the eyes can all be a result of anxiety.

Skin Rashes Stress can cause hives, itching, and rashes. If you already have rosacea or psoriasis, it can be aggravated by anxiety and stress. Shooting Pains These can be experienced in several areas of your body including your face, abdomen, arms, and chest during episodes of anxiety.

Freezing Hands and Feet Stress and anxiety can decrease your circulation.
As a result, your hands and feet may feel icy.
Alleviating Anxiety Depending on whether you have an actual anxiety disorder or the severity of the symptoms, an anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medication may be the solution.
But there are other things you can do as well to reduce anxiety and alleviate symptoms.

During periods of high stress, get plenty of rest. This will help keep anxiety under control and result in fewer or less severe symptoms. Also, practice slow breathing. Alice Boyes Ph.D. in her article, “Breathing Techniques for Anxiety,” says the key is to focus only on breathing out.

While concentrating on slowly, steadily, and gently breathing out, allow the tension to flow out of your body and relaxation to flow in. Mindfulness meditation is another useful technique for reducing anxiety according to a growing body of research. You can start by meditating for just a few minutes each day and gradually increase it to longer periods.

Get some exercise. It doesn’t have to be a lengthy, hardcore workout. Even a 10-minute brisk walk can provide several hours of anxiety relief according to psychologists, says the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Finally, if your doctor has told you your symptoms are anxiety related, remind yourself of this when symptoms strike.

What illness causes a sweet smell?

Maple syrup urine disease (MSUD) is a rare but serious inherited condition. It means the body cannot process certain amino acids (the “building blocks” of protein), causing a harmful build-up of substances in the blood and urine. Normally, our bodies break down protein foods such as meat and fish into amino acids.

Any amino acids that are not needed are usually broken down and removed from the body. Babies with MSUD are unable to break down amino acids called leucine, isoleucine and valine. Very high levels of these amino acids are harmful. One of the characteristic symptoms of MSUD is sweet-smelling urine, which gives the condition its name.

At around 5 days old, babies are offered newborn blood spot screening to check for inherited conditions like MSUD. This involves pricking your baby’s heel to collect drops of blood to test. If your baby is diagnosed with MSUD, treatment should be given straight away to reduce the risk of serious complications.

With early diagnosis and the correct treatment, the outcome can be greatly improved.
However, treatment for MSUD must be continued for life.
Without treatment, severe, life-threatening symptoms can develop, including seizures (fits) or falling into a coma,
Some children with untreated MSUD are also at risk of brain damage and developmental delay.

Symptoms of MSUD usually appear within the first few days or weeks after birth. More general symptoms include:

sweet-smelling urine and sweatpoor feeding or loss of appetiteweight loss

Babies with MSUD may also have episodes known as a “metabolic crisis”, sometimes early in their life. Symptoms of a metabolic crisis include:

lack of energyvomitingirritabilitybreathing difficulties

It’s important to get medical help immediately if your baby develops symptoms of a metabolic crisis. Your doctor will give you advice to help you recognise the signs. Some babies with MSUD might not develop symptoms of a metabolic crisis until later in their first year, or later in childhood.

Do you smell sweet if you have diabetes?

Diabetes – A person with uncontrolled diabetes may have blood glucose levels that are dangerously high. The body tries to get rid of the extra glucose in the urine, and this can cause a sweet smell. People with sweet-smelling urine due to diabetes may notice other symptoms, including:

exhaustionextreme thirstappetite changesunexplained weight loss

What are common Covid smells?

How are COVID-19 long haulers experiencing parosmia? – A loss of taste and smell is a common symptom of COVID-19 infection. In the recovery phase of COVID-19, a patient normally regains their senses back. However, some people experience a change to their sense of smell about three to four months following infection.

People report certain things—like food or body odor—smelling like garbage, rotten eggs, or chemicals. This altered sense of smell is called parosmia. The number of patients who experience a loss of smell and taste during or after COVID-19 infection ranged widely. The loss or change of taste and smell during COVID-19 infection impacts about 50-75 percent of people.

About 25-75 percent go on to develop parosmia in the recovery phase of COVID-19.

What kind of brain tumor causes phantosmia?

Phantosmia and dysgeusia as the first presentation of glioblastoma.

Are phantom smells a symptom of Covid?

Non-neuronal expression of SARS-CoV-2 entry genes in the olfactory system suggests mechanisms underlying COVID-19-associated anosmia. Altered olfactory function is a common symptom of COVID-19, but its etiology is unknown.

What bacteria smells like strawberries?

Why does rotting food smell bad? When food goes bad and starts to become pungent, it is most often due to the growth of spoilage microbes such as bacteria, yeasts and mold. Odors can come from two sources: chemicals that are released from the food as the microbes decompose it, or chemicals produced directly by the microbes themselves. One guess only: does this lettuce smell bad? Why do these microbes go to all the trouble to produce such a frightening bouquet of rotten odors? In some cases, microbial odors are probably just byproducts of other essential processes that the microbes need to engage in for survival.

In other cases, those rotten smells could be byproducts of microbial warfare.
Aromatic compounds related to food spoilage have been shown to play important roles in the interactions between microbial species.
Some scientists have suggested—although it’s quite difficult to prove—that microbes have evolved to produce these odors as a way to compete with humans and other large animals.

By making food unappealing to us, the microbes are stealing our resources for their own survival. While we tend to think of rotting food as a bad thing, humans have figured out how to intentionally rot foods to give them unique flavors. In fermented foods, desirable microbes are encouraged to grow on raw materials like cabbage, milk or meat to create products such as sauerkraut, cheese or salami.

Some of these fermentation microbes—which we study —are quite similar to or even the same as microbes that can cause spoilage.
It’s extremely important to note that the smell test is not a sure bet when evaluating whether food is safe to eat.
Many of the microbes that can cause food-borne illness do not produce detectable odors when they grow in food.

Just because a suspicious food item doesn’t smell bad doesn’t mean it’s safe for consumption. When in doubt, throw it out.

What gas smells like strawberries?

Ester smells like strawberries and other fruit because they exhibit weak intermolecular forces. This allows ester molecules to enter the gas phase and reach your nose.

What is the strawberry aroma called?

Ethyl methylphenylglycidate, commonly known as strawberry aldehyde, is an organic compound used in the flavor industry in artificial fruit flavors, in particular strawberry.

What bacteria has a strawberry smell?

In other cases, those rotten smells could be byproducts of microbial warfare.
Aromatic compounds related to food spoilage have been shown to play important roles in the interactions between microbial species.
Some scientists have suggested—although it’s quite difficult to prove—that microbes have evolved to produce these odors as a way to compete with humans and other large animals.

Some of these fermentation microbes—which we study —are quite similar to or even the same as microbes that can cause spoilage.
It’s extremely important to note that the smell test is not a sure bet when evaluating whether food is safe to eat.
Many of the microbes that can cause food-borne illness do not produce detectable odors when they grow in food.

You might be interested: Readers ask: How To Plant Blueray Blueberry?

Just because a suspicious food item doesn’t smell bad doesn’t mean it’s safe for consumption. When in doubt, throw it out.

Can mold smell like strawberries?

Scientists have found a way to generate a potent wild strawberry scent by allowing one particular fungus to work on the pulp, seeds, and skin of black currants, a type of berry commonly grown in Europe. They their results on November 17 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Their motivation was to cheaply reuse agricultural waste, converting it into “natural flavors in a highly sustainable way,” says, a food scientist at the Institute of Food Chemistry and Food Biotechnology at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Hesse, Germany, and one of the researchers.

But, so far, the group of fungi Zorn and his colleagues are exploring—which includes mushrooms and other so-called higher fungi—haven’t been commonly used. To help change that, the researchers grew several hundred different fungal strains on a particular sort of agricultural waste. When fruits such as black currants are pressed into juice, the process leaves behind a medley of pulp, seeds, and skin called pomace.

Once the fungi developed, the scientists used a well-proven way to judge aromas from the fermented material. “We just smelled the plates to see what kind of flavour develops,” says Zorn. A panel of PhD students and postdocs, whose noses were trained by weekly seminars to recognize and describe different flavors, tested the scents.

Growing on the plate was Wolfiporia cocos, an edible fungus found on wood in forests. This fungus is known to practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, can calm the mind and promote urination. The scientists’ next step was to identify the compounds that caused the strawberry scent. When you smell a scent, you’re really smelling a combination of specific molecules, or compounds, with obscure names such as (R)-linalool, methyl anthranilate, geraniol and 2-aminobenzaldehyde.

Sustainably creating a wild strawberry scent is useful, because although wild strawberries have an odor and flavor that’s more concentrated and more potent than their domesticated counterparts, an individual wild strawberry is small.
It doesn’t contain many aromatic compounds.
Real wild strawberries are also hard to find in their forest homes.

Is smelling like strawberries attractive?

Strawberry: In one study, the sweet scent of strawberry increased arousal in people who were told the smell had that effect. While we would normally chalk this up to the placebo effect, the same results were not reported when subjects smelled other fruits, suggesting the smell may affect the body after all.

What causes the smell of fruit?

Eric Kilby / Flickr Next time you find yourself reaching for an orange from a fruit bowl, or taking a banana out of your lunchbox, just take a moment to appreciate the sweet and varied scents of the fruit we eat. According to a recent study, it could just be that you are inhaling an aroma which has evolved as an important signal to us primates over millions of years.

The smell of ripe fruit is created by volatile chemicals (‘volatile’ meaning they evaporate readily into the surrounding air) produced by the plant, known as ‘plant secondary metabolites’ or PSMs.
These PSMs serve diverse functions, ranging from making the plant or fruit inedible to herbivores, preventing disease, and even controlling the digestive process.

One largely consistent aspect of PSMs, however, is that they are thought to be one of the main ways in which plants may communicate with animals. This is something many plants need to do for a number of reasons – either to show they’re inedible, to attract pollinators, and, later in the plant reproductive cycle, show off their seed-bearing fruits.

Many fruit-eating animals (frugivores) such as bats, birds and primates play a crucial ecological role simply by gorging on fruit – in many plant species, the seeds are able to tolerate the passage through the digestive tract, and get dispersed further away from the parent plants (with a nice helping of fertiliser to help them along too!).

This relationship mutually benefits both the fruit-eaters and the plants, though on one condition – that the fruit is not picked until it is ripe (i.e. the seeds are ready to germinate). It is well known that fruits advertise their ripeness visually, showing off a range of vivid hues and shades. Conversely, a ‘signal’ is information provided by a plant which is under natural selection to fulfil that exact purpose – such as the shape, odour and colour of flowers, which is solely for the purpose of attracting pollinators. Bright colouring may certainly make fruit more appealing, but the recent behavioural study has suggested that important seed-dispersing primates such as spider monkeys ( Ateles geoffroyi ), which are capable of rapidly telling whether fruit is ripe or not, rely primarily on their sense of smell.

Researchers from the German Primate Centre, collaborating internationally with a team of botanists, have attempted to determine whether the odour of ripe fruit is an evolved signal rather than a cue exploited by primates.
Though this has been suggested before, they are the first to empirically test the idea.

To do this, they looked at the PSMs produced by four plant species – two that rely on primates for seed-dispersal, and two that relied on birds – thought to mainly use vision for foraging, relying less on smell. Under the assumption that all the fruits would produce PSMs regardless (due to their multiple functions), a rapid change in the PSMs produced would indicate that the plant is ‘signaling’ primates.

The authors created a profile of the PSMs produced by the fruit, identifying the different compounds, and measured how these profiles varied according to species and to the ripeness of the fruit. They found that the profile was significantly different in ripe fruit in the case of the two primate-dispersed species, though not so in the bird-dispersed species.

Moreover, the chosen primate-dispersed species are more closely related to the bird-dispersed ones than each other, suggesting this may be a repeated evolutionary trend, perhaps an inevitable consequence of recruiting animals which rely on their sense of smell so heavily for dispersing seeds.

The researchers caution that the results are only from four species, and that much more work needs to be done to see whether this relationship exists across the animal (and plant) kingdom – but for the time being, next time you find yourself snacking on a piece of fruit, you can consider why it smells so sweet.

reference Nevo, O., Heymann, E.W., Schulz, S., & Ayasse, M. (2016). Fruit Odor as A Ripeness Signal for Seed-Dispersing Primates? A Case Study on Four Neotropical Plant Species. Journal of Chemical Ecology, 1-6. DOI: 10.1007/s10886-016-0687-x subscribe Discover the story behind the research through the scientist’s eyes, subscribe to Biosphere digital magazine for access to in-depth articles that bring the natural world to life.