Regular readers may well recall that it's been know for some time that rats infected with toxoplasma gondii lose their fear of the smell of cat urine.
What appears new to the story, however, is that the smell of cats not only doesn't worry them, it:
...also makes them mentally and sexually aroused each time their tiny pink noses detect cat smells. ...Not only that, but female rats find infected male rats pretty sexy too:
"What this damn parasite knows how to do is make cat urine smell sexy to male rats," Sapolsky said. After being exposed in laboratory tests to different cat scents, infected male rats showed a spike in testosterone levels and their testes became engorged.
....female rats also responded to the change in hormone levels by showing preference toward infected males approximately 95 percent of the time, Sapolsky said, which came as another interesting find."One of the rules of evolutionary biology is if you're an animal, you don't want to mate with anyone full of parasites," Sapolsky said. "Somehow that doesn't happen with T. gondii infection."
Well then, maybe we are lucky that toxoplasma gondii didn't work out how to make the evolutionary proto-human males of Africa sexually aroused by lions.
(I can see the basis for some good science fiction in this story too.)
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