Maine’s Whitetails May Be Enhancing Mating Dances With Ultraviolet Scrapings To Attract Females

When bucks are scraping trees with their antlers during mating season, they may be leaving a UV light message for their potential love interests, a new study shows.

A wildlife researcher suspecting the scrapings may be a clue into male rutting confirmed his suspicion using a spectrometer, an instrument that measures the amount and wavelength of light that a surface emits, to examine deer scrapings on trees.

Daniel DeRose-Broeckert found that the markings produce a significant glow under UV light, according to Wildlife.org.

He knew that white-tailed deer are sensitive to shorter wavelength light – the kind of light responsible for blues, purples and UV light.

So he followed his hunch.

Humans can’t see UV light because we have lenses that filter out those wavelengths.

But deer eyes have different structures. “It’s not confirmed, but common sense would tell you that UV light helps deer see,” DeRose-Broeckert said.