Is it Time to Replace Toucan Sam? How Elephants Follow Their Noses to the Fruitiest Flavors

He’s rapped with rhinos, outwitted pirates, and escaped the clutches of carnivorous flowers—all in the name of breakfast cereal. In his 60+ years as the Froot Loops mascot, Toucan Sam has starred in hundreds of commercials, showing generations of cereal lovers how to follow their noses to the flavors of fruit.

But are Sam’s scent-sleuthing skills worth crowing about? Toucans’ polychromatic beaks might make them attractive spokes-birds, but when it comes to sniffing out the fruitiest flavors, elephants are the top banana. 

Surprising Sense of Smell

When Toucan Sam soared into the limelight in 1963, most biologists believed birds couldn’t smell. For decades, research focused on birds’ vision and hearing—senses that seemed more relevant to aerial animals with vast vocal repertories and vibrant plumage patterns. 

Scientists now know that many birds have outstanding olfactory abilities. Turkey vultures can smell their lifeless lunches from more than a mile away. Nomadic seabirds, like albatrosses, follow chemical trails to pinpoint plankton beneath the water’s surface. And pigeons create odor maps to find their way home. 

The toucan’s sense of smell, however, remains a bit of a mystery. Olfactory research specific to these big-billed birds is scarce. Until recently, scientists assumed they had subpar sniffers and used their keen vision to forage for fruit.

But a team of Spanish and Costa Rican scientists recently discovered that keel-billed (Ramphastos sulfuratus) and yellow-throated toucans (Ramphastos ambiguus) can sniff out sweet snacks even when they can’t see them. When presented with three perforated, opaque containers containing vinegar, water, and banana-papaya juice, captive toucans spent significantly more time interacting with the juice-filled vessels. These results provide the first evidence that toucans might use olfactory cues for foraging. 

Although more research is needed, the findings bode well for Sam’s reputation. Lucky for him, since “Follow your eyes” isn’t as catchy as “Follow your nose.” 

But how does Sam’s sense of smell stack up to some other sugar-seeking animals? Maybe not as well as advertisers want us to believe. 

Super-Sized Sugar Cravings 

Like Sam, elephants have a sweet tooth. They also seem to share his fondness for fruit-flavored cereal.  But when Froot Loops are in short supply, elephants satisfy their sugar-cravings by following their noses to find fresh fruit. These pachyderms also possess an olfactory superpower that Sam can’t match—they can use their sensitive snouts to identify which fruits will taste the sweetest without even taking a bite. 

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) fancy marula fruit—a plum-sized mango relative with a tangy-sweet flavor—and they seem to have a knack for knowing when the fruits are ripe. In some South African communities, villagers even time their marula harvests around the elephants’ arrival. When the beasts gather beneath the local marula trees, villagers rush to collect the fruit and sell it to a liquor company to be turned into gin. 

New research hints at the mechanisms elephants use to locate the ripening fruit. In a series of experiments, scientists presented African elephants with two bins containing ripe marula fruits with varying sugar levels. The elephants could not see or touch inside the bins, forcing them to use olfactory cues to choose the fruit they most wanted to eat. 

The elephants routinely picked the fruits with the higher sugar levels. The greater the difference in sugar between each pair of fruits, the more likely the elephants were to select the sweetest one. Once the difference fell below 7%, the elephants showed no preference for either fruit.  

Odor samples taken from the fruits revealed that elephants selected the sugarier snacks by sniffing out concentrations of ethanol and ethyl acetate, chemical vapors produced during sugar fermentation. Higher levels of ethanol signified sweeter fruit.

A Nose for Numbers

Elephants’ notable noses outperform Sam’s in yet another way. While many animals—including some birds—can look at two cereal bowls and choose the one with more fruit-flavored loops, elephants can pick the more bountiful breakfast even when blindfolded. 

A recent study revealed that Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) can identify different quantities of food using olfaction alone, making them the first animals to demonstrate a smell-based number sense.

Researchers presented six captive elephants with two buckets containing varying amounts of sunflower seeds (they must have been out of Froot Loops). The elephants couldn’t see or touch the seeds, but they were able to smell the tasty treats through holes in the bucket lids. After sniffing each bucket, the elephants indicated which container they wanted to snack from. 

Across multiple trials with 11 different seed ratios, the elephants routinely selected the buckets containing the larger quantities. They performed best when the differences between the seed quantities were large —16 grams versus 4 grams or 60 seeds versus 240 seeds. As the difference between the two quantities diminished, the elephants’ consistency dropped a bit. However, two overachievers differentiated between piles of 150 and 180 seeds.

Scent Sensing is in Their Genes

Like most superpowers, elephants’ extraordinary olfactory skills are genetically based. Their smell sensing genes duplicated and mutated many times throughout their evolutionary history, leaving them with a smell receptor repertoire that blows away the competition.

Smell receptors—also called olfactory receptors—are proteins lining the nasal cavity. They detect odors from the environment and pass the information along to the brain. Different smell receptors bind different types of odor molecules, so animals with more diverse smell receptor repertoires can pick up more scents from their surroundings. 

Elephants have nearly 2000 different genes that code for smell receptors—that’s almost five times as many as humans (400) and more than two times that of dogs (800). Elephants’ olfactory diversity even surpasses rats, which have an impressive repertoire of 1200 genes. 

Smell receptor genes in birds are less understood, but genomic studies indicate that chickens have 355 olfactory genes and emus have 296. In contrast, zebra finches have just 69. Kiwis—the bloodhounds of the bird world—have an estimated 600 genes. These numbers are nothing to sneeze at, but they don’t compare to those of pachyderms.

So how does elephants’ olfactory prowess affect Sam’s status as a cereal sommelier? Nostalgia and popularity will keep him from getting canceled, but his sniffer can’t compete with other super-sized schnozzes. In a nose-to-nose match-up, elephants take the (fruit)cake.

To learn more about animals with amazing abilities, check out this article on the superpowers of squirrels.