Friday, February 19, 2010

Live deer vs. synthetic musks experiment


So I decided to do something ridiculous and I wanted to see what live deer would think of a few different synthetic musks and how interested they would be in sniffing them (or if at all). Luckily I know where a magical pack of super-friendly deer live so I went over to visit them with a few dropper vials and scent strips.

For this experiment I took Galaxolide, Tonalide, Habanolide and Exaltolide as well as two controls (non musks) with me, ethyl vanillin and methyl anthranilate. I tested the deer as best I could by presenting the scent strips while my lovely assistant logged average sniffing times in seconds. Each average did not have the same amount of deer as they weren't infinitely patient but they ranged between 6 and 9 deer per material. We are fairly confident that we didn't record the same deer twice on each trial.
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ethyl Vanillin: (3.6 seconds)
methyl Anthranilate (2.2 seconds)
Galaxolide: (4.6 seconds)
Tonalide: (4.9 seconds)
Habanolide (4.7 seconds)
Exaltolide (4.1 seconds)
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Qualitative Data:
Above and beyond the information from the averages, we noted that the times for ethyl vanillin and methyl anthranilate had a wider distribution with outliers on the near and far ends of the spectrum, while the times for the musks were much closer to a bell pattern with future outliers.
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Conclusions:
It appears there is some support for the hypothesis that live deer prefer the scent of synthetic musks to non-musk chemicals. More testing is needed.
PS - no deer were harmed during these tests, in fact we fed them a whole bag of carrots after :) this was just for fun as is not intended as a real scientific study.

2 comments:

Stephen said...

Hallo there. A great fun idea for an experiment! Loved reading it. I have three bottles of musks that I purchased from the Perfumer's Apprentice, these being Muscone, Velvione and Animalis. To my horror I do not get a smell off any of these apart from the Velvione which smells kind of fuzzy for want of a better word. Is this because I have smelled these without diluting them? The velvione actually hardened in the cold weather here. Would these aroma chemicals bloom if diluted? Thanks for any advice

Lura said...

hysterical
wish you'd videoed it!