How cats react to catnip has long baffled their owners – and scientists. Now it appears that insect-repelling chemicals in the plant could be a factor.
The scientists were still curious about why cats chew and spit out the leaves, however. Cats swallow little of the catnip and silver vine that they lick and chew, so the research group suspected that the animals weren’t getting a medicinal effect from swallowing the plants.
The damaged leaves of farmed catnip plants emitted 20 times more iridoids into the air compared with undamaged leaves, says Miyazaki. Emissions from wild silver vine plants were 10-fold greater when the leaves had been chewed by cats and up to 40-fold greater when they had been chopped up by humans – although the reason for that difference isn’t yet known, he adds.
The emissions from both plants effectively repelled young female Asian tiger mosquitoes in the laboratory, and the eight test cats all equally rubbed, licked and rolled on perforated plastic boxes filled with either catnip or silver vine.
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