How far can silkworms smell?
Silkworms and female silkworm moths have no sense of smell. Wild adult male silkmoths have an acute sense of smell, but I don’t know how far they can smell. I’ve never seen it in a book or tested it. From personal experience I know that a domestic silkworm male can notice a female silkworm at the opposite end of a large gymnasium, but never have tested a larger distance. I suspect that 1/4 mile would be the limit for a wild silkworm moth (downwind), but I bet that domesticated silkworms have lost much of that sensitivity since they were bred for silk, and natural selection no longer requires them to have any sense of smell whatsoever.
