One scent woos elephants and insects.

Some female insects and elephants release the same airborne compound to attract the attention of males, a new study reveals.

After analyzing about 4,000 liters of elephant urine, researchers isolated the pheromone that appears just before ovulation and alerts males to the female's readiness to mate.

"Remarkably, it is the same compound. . . used by insects" from cabbage loopers to dingy cutworms, report L.E.L. ("Bets") Rasmussen of the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology in Portland and her colleagues in the Feb. 22 Nature. Some insect traps contain a synthetic version of the chemical, (Z)-7-dodecen-1-yl acetate.

Despite the common pheromone, elephants and insects probably don't pick up on each other's sexual signals, Rasmussen says. They produce dramatically different amounts of the pheromone and combine it with different chemicals. The researchers monitored the response of bull elephants at three U.S. zoos to various chemicals extracted from the urine of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). Pheromone-laced urine elicits a so-called flehmen response from a bull. He dips his trunk in the liquid, then touches the tip of his trunk to the roof of his mouth. The stronger the concentration of (Z)-7-dodecen-1-yl acetate in the samples, the more often the Asian elephants repeated the flehmen response.

In fact, says Rasmussen, whose pheromone work grew out of her interest in artificial insemination of elephants, the animals sometimes get erections from the samples. Wildlife managers and zookeepers may find the chemical useful for collecting semen, she asserts.

The compound may prove useful under special conditions, agrees Nancy Pratt of the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. However, getting semen from captive elephants is already fairly easy, and artificial insemination has yet to work in elephants, she says.