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Fruit, flies and getting frisky: how food odours trigger sexual arousal
Thomas O. Auer is in the Department of Biology and at the Food Research and Innovation Center, University of Fribourg, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.
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When the goddess Hera set out to seduce Zeus in Homer’s The Iliad, she did not start with her looks, but with perfume, preparing an ambrosial oil with a fragrance that filled “heaven and Earth”. The idea that scent kindles desire still captures our imaginations, but how odours act on the human brain to drive sexual attraction is unclear, and decades of searching for sex pheromones have produced no convincing candidates. That is not the case for insects, in which chemical sex signals are well understood. Writing in Nature, Brand et al.1 add another piece to the mosaic of sexual communication. By comparing fly species that are adapted to different host fruits, they show that food odours can be key for male sexual arousal. Flies combine this cue with information about their social environment to get into the mood for mating.
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Brand, P. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11209-9 (2026).
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