In their experiments, Pletcher and Gendron didn’t see increased reproductive output from death-exposed flies. Tatar suspects that dead flies are a sign of danger for those still living, so he expects that seeing them leads flies to put more energy into reproduction at the expense of longevity.Ī 2022 paper reported that female flies exposed to dead bodies laid more eggs, but it found no effect on life span Pletcher said the authors used “significantly less severe” corpse exposures, which could lead to different effects. It’s not abundantly clear why seeing dead flies would cause those still alive to rush to join them. “They show that a specific set of serotonin-receptor-possessing neurons are used” by living flies to perceive dead ones, said Marc Tatar, a biologist at Brown University who was not involved with the study. When the researchers activated those neuron clusters, flies met their maker sooner, even if they had never been exposed to dead flies. When these were shut off, seeing dead flies did nothing to the life span of the living. Gendron and Pletcher then identified the key neurons in the ellipsoid body. Dissecting these death-exposed flies revealed activity in the ellipsoid body, which integrates sensory information in the brain. The two scientists housed living flies in vials with fly cadavers for two days, and tracked their brain activity with a fluorescent green dye. “Our lab has long been interested in how the brain controls aging,” Pletcher said, so they decided to dig into how the sensory perception of dead flies was being translated into a shorter life span in living flies. The carcass-viewers also quickly lost stored fat and died sooner than their nontraumatized counterparts. Pletcher and Gendron found that flies that had seen corpses were avoided by other flies, as if they’d been marked by death (how this works is still a mystery). “The only types of responses we saw happened after the flies that we infected died,” Pletcher said. They were trying to see whether flies would show a behavioral or physiological response, like a heightened immune system, after being around other flies that had been made sick with a pathogen. Gendron and Scott Pletcher, a biologist at the University of Michigan, discovered how flies deal with mortality unintentionally. Elephants grieve for their dead crows hold “funerals” and for bees, ants and termites, undertaking is a specialized job performed by only some colony members. Animals across the kingdom of life are keenly aware of death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |