08-19-2012, 05:15 PM
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Sexually Rejected Flies Turn to Booze
Quote:
Offer a male fruit fly a choice between food soaked in alcohol and its nonalcoholic equivalent, and his decision will depend on whether he's mated recently or been rejected by a female. Flies that have been given the cold shoulder are more likely to go for the booze, researchers have found. It's the first discovery, in fruit flies, of a social interaction that influences future behavior.
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The scientists put 24 male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in one of two situations. Half the males were placed in vials in groups of four, each group with 20 female flies that were ready to mate, allowing the males to mate with multiple females. The other half of the males were put alone in vials, each with one female that had already mated, making her reject any courtship advances. After 4 days of repeated mating or rejection, the male flies were moved to new containers, with capillaries containing food mash—some with alcohol and others without—that they could eat. Each fly could chose which capillary to drink from, and the researchers measured the amount that was consumed.
The researchers expected all of the flies to prefer alcohol, but that's not what they found. "You see that the mated males actually have an aversion to the alcohol-containing food," Shohat-Ophir says. "And the rejected males have a high preference to that food with alcohol." On average, the rejected males drank four times more alcohol than the mated ones, her team reports online today in Science.
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Sexually Rejected Flies Turn to Booze - ScienceNOW
Well, duh!
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Courtesy of Swissman
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