Students found themselves wrinkling their noses at a foul smell in the science building Thursday, Nov. 18.  It was the smell of rivalry: Advanced Placement Chemistry vs. Advanced Placement Biology.

The rivalry, or rather war, started at the beginning of the school year when some students from AP Biology threw potatoes in Lisa Autry’s AP Chemistry class.

“We were working with potatoes, which is obviously, very biological,” June Bourque, AP Biology teacher, said.  “[A student] said, ‘We should go throw these in her room!’  and thus started the pranks back and forth on each other.”

The pranks have been going on between the two classes, but the biggest one to date was the one students could smell in the science building.

At the beginning of the day AP Biology opened a jar of flies in the AP Chemistry class.  AP Chemistry had already prepared the foul smelling gas, but decided to wait.  It was the flies being released in the room that set off AP Chemistry.

“We decided as a class that to get back at them we would fill a bottle up with a little bit of butyric acid, which is known as a super smelly acid,” Will Haenni, junior, said. “So we put it in a bottle and then we rolled the bottle around to make the acid into a gas and then we put a note inside.”

The next events that occurred, however, did not go as planned.

“What we thought would happen is that they would open the bottle, smell it and close the bottle back up and that would be it,” Autry said.  “Unfortunately, they opened the bottle, dumped out the contents and then threw the contents into the trash.”

The gas began to spread not only throughout the classroom, but soon, the science building began to smell like the butyric acid.  Some teachers thought there might have been a lab accident and according to Bourque, administrators were not pleased about the situation, but in the end, it worked out for the best.

“It brought the two classes together as sort of a community,” Bourque said.  “It was definitely a friendly thing. It just was a little bigger than the both of us.”