The Predators have no shortage of increasingly deadly weapons in their arsenal with which they use to not only hunt humans, but other worthy prey across the cosmos, and out of all of them, one weapon stands out as perhaps the Yautja’s most useful–too bad it has one huge weakness.
As established pretty quickly with the alien species’ first appearance in the 1987 film, Predator, the Yautja’s ability to turn invisible by-way of a cloaking device is easily its greatest weapon. Throughout the entire first half of the movie, the humans being hunted by the Predator are absolutely terrified, as it looks like the jungle ‘comes alive’ and takes people before they are found skinned and strung up in the trees. The Predator’s cloaking device not only allowed it to move freely and unseen around its prey, but also made the humans it was hunting feel like they were powerless to fight back, ensuring a successful hunt. However, there is one weird weakness to this seemingly fool-proof hunting method, and it has nothing to do with disabling the cloaking device.
Humans Can Smell Predators, Making Their Invisibility Useless
In Predator: Fire and Stone #1 by Joshua Williamson and Christopher Mooneyham, a team of Predators has boarded a human space vessel in search of the perfect weapon to use against Xenomorphs, one that was taken by someone onboard from the world they were just leaving. This weapon actually isn’t Yautja in origin, but rather Engineer–though the Predators want it for their own Xenomorph-killing purposes, and they aren’t going to let a team of humans keep them from their prize. So, using their cloaking tech, the Predators board the ship and kill the humans one-by-one until the gun is theirs–but, it actually wasn’t that simple. In one instance, a Predator had one of the humans cornered in a sealed-off area of the ship while it had its cloaking device activated and fully operational, meaning this person should have been an easy kill for the expert hunter. However, because the person could smell the Predator when it drew near, he was able to pinpoint its location and deliver a few blows before eventually being overpowered by the Yautja.
While the human in this issue was killed, the fact that he could find the Predator just from its evidently pungent scent, and use that as a way to get in a couple of good hits, means that he also could have used his nose to kill it–if he had the right weapon. Predators are tough, but they’re far from invulnerable, as the majority of their hunting proficiency comes from not being seen (hence why their cloaking ability is their greatest weapon). So, if a human was wielding a weapon similar to the one these Predators were after in the first place, and could use the smell of a Predator to pinpoint their location, then the Predator would be history–all while thinking it was safe being unseen.
This method of tracking a Yautja is undeniably weird and totally unexpected, but this issue proves that it actually works, as a Predator’s greatest weapon is evidently useless against a human’s sense of smell.
