Alcohol makes male fly sexually attractive – Diepresse.com
When fruit fly men consume alcohol, your pairing success increases: a new study comes to this astonishing result-and it also provides the reason.
What have we not learned about the drinking behavior of the fruit fly men! If your females reject them or forced them to abstainability, search for consolation in alcohol, researchers found in 2012. Alcohol makes their hetero-male bisexual, they also do it with their peers, an experiment resulted in seven years ago. And now a team from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena amazes us with a new knowledge: Alcohol consumption makes male animals sexually attractive for females (Science Advances, 2.4.). Like that?
It is easy to explain that fruit flies, more precisely the drosophila melanogaster are examined for their alcohol consumption, are easy to explain: these animals feed on rugged fruit and vegetables that contain high amounts of alcohol. How do the animals deal with it, why don’t they suffer from harmful consequences, how do they know when it is enough? The answers to this could be useful for addiction treatment in humans. The conspicuous sexual behavior that scientists observe already shows that much is probably not comparable: While the « frustration » and perhaps also a stronger sexual openness under the influence of alcohol can also be demonstrated in Homo sapiens, our species do not find the women with more attractive than sober. What is different with the fruit flies?
The team under the direction of Ian Keesey (now at the University of Nebraska) has found the reason: the methanol supplied increases the production of sexualphers, i.e. fragrances, attract potential partners. That is why partnerless fruit fly male are particularly entitled to alcohol. Why does this effect not lead to frenzy, addiction and physical decay? It regulates himself in a great practical way: drink the males too much, the concentration of the pheromones also increases so much that they have a repulsive effect on the females. The males then no longer smell, but stink. In the terminology tailored to our olfactory perception, you have a flag.
Before it comes to this, a control mechanism is already using the males. This ingredient balance is thanks to three neural circuits in the Drosophila brain. So there is an unusually high, from the researcher’s point of view even « unique » effort behind it. It’s a shame that nature does not operate it with us too.
