this post was submitted on 28 May 2024

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Ant smell (mander.xyz)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 5 months ago (10 children)

Wait, is that true? Is someone able to smell ants?

[–] [email protected] 83 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (13 children)

There are lots of weird genetic traits. Sneezing triggered by sunlight is another funny one.

Veritasium video on that one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e69XZJ9DEj0

[–] [email protected] 90 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I got the "cilantro tastes like soap" gene personally. Would much rather have gotten the, "Always remember where I left my car keys" gene, or maybe the, "Come up with witty retorts on the spot instead of two hours later in the shower" one.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

At least you don't have my "sky-high cholesterol no matter what you eat" gene.

Also artificial sweeteners have an unpleasant chemical aftertaste that lingers for a long time. Apparently that's generic too...

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (1 children)

TIL about the artificial sweetener thing, this explains a lot. I have never been able to understand people enjoying diet soda.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Dude, same, and this is the first time I've heard of it. I thought the Diet Dr. Pepper commercials were just being cheeky when trying to compare it to dessert.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

have you tried ants?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

My grandfather had low cholesterol no matter what. It was always perfect. This man ate more bacon and had more buttermilk and cornbread than anyone I've ever met in my life.

I have to watch mine pretty closely. Well, I should, but I'll just die horribly and early I guess. The alcohol will get me first anyway.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Hah, my grandfather had heart problems and very high cholesterol so we gave him such a hard time for eating unhealthy food. But now I have been a vegetarian for almost twenty years (I try to avoid eggs and dairy too) and my cholesterol is just as high as his was, unless I take medications. So we should have just let him eat whatever he wanted to...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I find that most sweeteners have the aftertaste, like Canderel and Sweetex, but Hermesetas taste fine. It might be worth trying a few brands and seeing if any work for you

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I love cilantro, but I got the celery tastes bitter and spicy gene. So many people tell me it's tasteless but it has a strong, terrible taste to me.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Bitter and spicy kinda sounds like an allergy my dude

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Celery tastes like that too me as well, but no allergy. I can eat it with no negative effects, other than the fact that I've had to taste celery.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's just that a lot of mild allergies sound just like that, no big obvious ill effects

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Celery man. Everyone tells me it has no taste, but to me it tastes like an entire lawn's worth of grass clippings compressed into a stick. Extremely pungent.

Same with cucumbers. They taste awfully strong and bitter to me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Look up the "TAS2R bitter taste receptor gene family". It's a fun little group of genes that control how well bitterness is detected.

I am a moderate bitter taster. So I do not like celery (mildly unpleasant flavor) and prefer cucumbers that contain the recessive bi gene that stops the production of cucubitacin in the plant. The ones that contain the bt gene, the skin gets too bitter for me. This gene mostly stops the cucubitacin production in the fruit but not the plant.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Yeah I really don't like celery. Cucumbers are pretty good if they're peeled, but yeah they have a very strong taste to me, and the peel is very bitter

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Cilantro tasted like soap to me until my wife described it as lemony, and it suddenly tasted different and now I like cilantro. Senses are weird

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Cognitive Modulation of Olfactory Processing: Neuron

We showed how cognitive, semantic information modulates olfactory representations in the brain by providing a visual word descriptor, “cheddar cheese” or “body odor,” during the delivery of a test odor (isovaleric acid with cheddar cheese flavor) and also during the delivery of clean air. Clean air labeled “air” was used as a control. Subjects rated the affective value of the test odor as significantly more unpleasant when labeled “body odor” than when labeled “cheddar cheese.” In an event-related fMRI design, we showed that the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)/medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was significantly more activated by the test stimulus and by clean air when labeled “cheddar cheese” than when labeled “body odor,” and the activations were correlated with the pleasantness ratings. This cognitive modulation was also found for the test odor (but not for the clean air) in the amygdala bilaterally.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

If I eat cilantro by itself and focus on the idea of it tasting like soap, I can kinds taste it. It still tastes good to me, just with a hint of soapiness. It's not enough to ruin it for me, and I have to be looking for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I love cilantro but one time I tasted the soap flavor. I had done a stir fry with cilantro and left the spoon in the still hot pot and there had been some cilantro stuck to the bottom of the spoon that sat there and cooked for as long as it took for the big pot to cool down. Then when I was doing dishes I picked up the spoon and I saw big bunch of cilantro so I ate it and it was horribly nasty and tasted like straight up hand soap. I thought for sure that some soap fell or splashed onto it but no it was just the cilantro. Never happened again either.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I have that! Sneezed twice today because of bright sunlight. It can sometimes also be triggered voluntarily by looking at a bright light. You can't trigger it multiple times in a row though. I suspect this is because sinuses need to recover from the shock of the sneeze.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

I can sneeze several times in a row if a light is bright enough. I've even triggered it just thinking of the sun, a few times.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Yep same here! It's nice when you feel a sneeze coming on and then it stops, you can kinda force it to happen!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wait that's a genetic quirk? I do that shit all the time with "the sneeze that won't sneeze"

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Still can't believe that some people are unable to smell rain coming in the summer!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

I honestly love that smell. It's relaxing.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

wait, not everyone gets that?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have sunlight-sneezing, my thoughts are spoken word, I can read in dreams, the dress is gold, and I alway hear "laurel."

What others are there?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I have a slightly different version of this. I get sneezing fits when too full. It's genetic and happens to most people on one side of my family. Thanksgiving is always fun.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I have the sunlight sneeze. I would much rather be able to smell ants.

This feels like a shitty superpower what-if.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Maybe not genetically, but fun fact about sneezing-quirks: There exists "Sneezing induced by sexual ideation or orgasm. Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2084455232396039941&hl=de&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1716906331494&u=%23p%3D-Y8j_fJVLLsJ

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Smell is how ants communicate with one another so maybe these ant sniffers will be the first humans who can speak ant.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Ants part of a super-organism often compared to a computer, so probably these people are sniffing their information packets.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

https://academic.oup.com/ae/article/61/2/85/1756864

https://www.livescience.com/why-ants-smell-weird

However, the sense of smell in humans is far less developed, and there has been recent controversy over what, exactly, the odorous house ant smells like. This species belongs to a large group of ants whose members are thought to smell like blue cheese (Forney and Markovetz 1971) [link is direct 3.0 mb .pdf download from elsevier], yet numerous online sources report their odor as “rancid butter,” “cleaning solution,” or, most commonly, “rotten coconuts.”

Specifically, the house ~~hippo~~ ant.

*The actual factual paper was actually literally published in 2015, no cap.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

At the same time, Penick had people rate what they thought the ant smelled like. Most people said blue cheese, but some thought it smelled like rotted coconut. So Penick rotted a coconut in his backyard and found a mold growing on it that, sure enough, is the same mold (Penicillium roqueforti) that's used to produce blue cheese. Another mystery, solved.

So American house ants, rotten coconuts and blue cheese all smell the same. Life is weird.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Uh oh. They smell like blue cheese? That means they smell delicious!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thats what i was thinking, i love bluecheese!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (5 children)

cant say for ant. but i can smell cockroaches

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

spoiler

asdfasfasfasfas

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Me who spent months taking Tupperware boxes full of cockroaches out of the freezer and separating them by hand because our ants were picky eaters: I still smell them, to this day.

Thanks ants. Thants.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have questions.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

just bio major things

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

100%

I can smell them to the point I know when an area has an abundance of ant hills.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I can, they also taste absolutely abhorrent and ruin food they are in for me. It's a very bitter chemical taste and smell.

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