Animals that can sniff out or spy kin can then provide food or protection to their closest relatives only, even in proportion to the blood-tie closeness. Because closer relatives share more genes, animals that provide for their close kin are helping promote the survival and reproduction of their own genes, exactly what natural selection is all about. Just what golden hamsters are using their keen powers of genealogical discrimination for in nature remains unknown. Well-known as a laboratory species, golden hamsters have been poorly studied in the wild. The new study may also help explain a curious discovery in peacocks.
Male peacocks gather in groups to display to females to entice females to mate.
In other species, such cooperative males have been found to be closely related, probably because often only one male gets all the matings. But researchers studying peacocks in Whipsnade Park in England, did not expect to find the birds to gather with relatives, since these birds were not raised with relatives and had no way of learning who their relatives were. Other research suggesting that humans may use the armpit effect include studies in small, closed religious groups showing that people tend to avoid marrying genetically similar people. The only definitive way to test whether these people, or the women in the T-shirt studies, were using their own smells as clues, as opposed to the smells of their families, would be to do the experiment as was done with the hamsters. Babies would need to be removed at birth, raised with nonrelatives and then tested for their ability to smell out a T-shirt or a mate.