BEIJING, May 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Much to their surprise, scientists trying to prove cat urine will make cowards of male mice, a new study found the more a male mouse smells like cat pee the more alluring he is to the ladies.

    Past studies had found cat odor typically causes mice to panic or flee. Scientists had expected that stressing out normal mice would curtail their love lives. To see if a whiff of cat might serve as a mouse repellent to help keep rodent pests away, researchers exposed mice to cat pee for eight weeks.

    Unexpectedly, two months of cat odor did not lead to cringing mice, as one might expect from constant threatening. Instead, researchers found it led to aggressive males. These were more than twice as likely fight with other mice than rodents exposed to rabbit urine for the same amount of time.

    And such combative males smelled sexy to females. When presented with male pee, females that were in heat spent more time sniffing urine from males exposed to cat odor for weeks than ones exposed to the odor of rabbit urine.

    Before, it was generally believed that the presence of predators always had a negative effect on their prey, "but our findings show that presence of low or moderate predation may be positive to prey," said researcher Jian-Xu Zhang, a pheromone researcher at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

    Female mice like aggressive males, and rodents constantly exposed to cat pee may seem like strong males that can survive the constant threat of predators, the researchers suggested.

    These findings could help improve life for animals in captivity, Zhang said. Zoos could enrich the environments of animals with just a whiff of their predators to stimulate them.

    (Agencies)