This article explains how pheromones play a role in communication between organisms, specifically how they contribute to survival and the maintenance of social structures, and emphasizes that as chemical signals, pheromones are an important product of evolution.
Survival of the fittest, a mode of survival recognized by all living things in nature. To survive the competition for survival, each organism has developed different strategies. One of the most important of these is communication. From viruses to whales, organisms of all sizes have evolved different types of communication, such as vocalizations, gestures, and chemicals, which are important for them to adapt to their environment and survive. Communication is itself a product of biological evolution, which has allowed organisms to interact and build complex ecosystems.
How organisms communicate is a fundamental and important part of their survival strategies. For example, predators find their prey, prey detect the predator’s approach and flee, and so on. This communication plays an important role in enabling organisms to go beyond mere survival to reproduce, form social structures, and maintain populations.
Of these, communication through chemicals is perhaps the best example of evolution because it is innate, not acquired. Chemicals are an essential tool for organisms to adapt to complex environments, regulating not only communication between individuals but also physiological processes within them. Pheromones are a prime example of such chemicals, and they have a powerful influence in many areas.
Pheromones are substances that are used as a means of communication between individuals, and they influence group behaviors such as sexual behavior, aggregation, and warning within a given species. They differ from hormones, which govern life activities within an individual, in that they are biological substances that affect collective behavior between individuals of the same species. The first form of pheromone is a “releaser” that acts through odor receptors to trigger behavior immediately, while the second form is a “primer” that is activated orally to induce longer-term physiological changes. These diverse functions of pheromones play a major role in the physiological and behavioral adaptations of organisms.
The primer effect is when an individual that receives a pheromone undergoes a series of physiological changes. These changes begin when the pheromone is absorbed into the body through the gustatory system. In bees and ants, which are social insects, these pheromones trigger complex physiological changes such as class differentiation and inhibition of reproduction. These changes don’t just alter the physiological state of the individual, but are essential for maintaining the structure of the population as a whole. Primer effect pheromones are therefore more than just signal transmitters, they play a very important role in the social organization and ecology of living things.
Take ants for example. Queen and worker ants are born from the same biologically identical egg, but they undergo different differentiation processes during development. The worker ants, who spend their entire lives bringing food to the queen and then die, are actually females, but they don’t develop reproductive structures. As you can see from this example, physiologic pheromones trigger specific physiological changes that allow ants to maintain hierarchy in their colony. This is an important example of how a group’s social structure can be formed and maintained through chemical cues without the need for physical differences between individuals.
On the other hand, release effects are when an individual receives a pheromone and immediately changes its behavior. These pheromones are also known as behavioral organopheromones, which act as a guide to what individuals should do in the future: they stimulate, inhibit, and guide a variety of behaviors, such as mating, attraction, and navigation, and they enable immediate survival responses in certain environments.
For example, they may disperse alarm pheromones to trigger vigilance in nearby conspecifics when they suddenly encounter a predator, or they may use aggregation pheromones and dispersal pheromones to signal the location of prey. These behavioral organic pheromones elicit rapid collective responses in certain situations and enable species to survive and thrive. The ichneumon fly is a prime example. This insect must lay its eggs on the larvae of other insects, a risky situation that can threaten their survival. However, the ichneumon fly uses pheromones as a strategy to survive in an ant colony. It cleverly uses attractant pheromones and aggression pheromones to trigger civil wars between ants.
There are many other roles for pheromones, and organisms use these chemicals to preserve species and maintain ecosystems. Humans have also understood how pheromones work and are using them in a variety of fields, including agriculture, pest control, and animal reproduction management. We look forward to further research on pheromones in the future to better understand the secrets of the natural world and put them to practical use.
Pheromones not only regulate the physiological responses of animals, but also play an important role in maintaining the balance of the entire ecosystem. Therefore, understanding pheromones remains one of the major challenges in life sciences, which will give humans the opportunity to further explore the complexity and mysteries of nature.
