Friday Catblogging: ‘How Cats Make the Most of Their Catnip High’

Oliver Whang reports Chewed and Rolled: How Cats Make the Most of Their Catnip High (‘A new study finds that the feline reaction to catnip and silver vine helps to stave off mosquitoes and other bloodsucking insects’):

But a new study, published Tuesday in the journal iScience, suggests that the reaction to catnip and silver vine might be explained by the bugrepellent effect of iridoids, the chemicals in the plants that induce the high.

Researchers, led by Masao Miyazaki, an animal behavior scientist at Iwate University in Japan, found that the amount of these iridoids released by the plant increased by more than 2,000 percent when the plant was damaged by cats. So perhaps kitty’s high confers an evolutionary advantage: keeping bloodsucking insects at bay.

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In their most recent study, Dr. Miyazaki and his associates measured the chemical composition of the air immediately above leaves — both intact and damaged — of catnip and silver vine. Then they measured the iridoid levels in the leaves themselves. They found that catnip leaves mangled by cats released at least 20 times more nepetalactone than intact leaves did, while damaged silver vine leaves released at least eight times the amount of similar iridoids than did intact leaves. The cats’ interactions with silver vine also changed the composition of the plant’s bug-repelling cocktail, making it even more potent.

After rubbing their faces and bodies against the plants, cats are sure to be coated in a robust layer of Pest Begone.

This finding, paired with Dr. Miyazaki and his team’s previous research, supports nascent claims that at least part of the benefit of the kitty catnip craze is to stave off mosquitoes and flies.