Your reward system is more primitive than you thought
Posted 16 March 2012 by Matt Young
Male fruit flies, when prevented from mating, prefer an alcoholic beverage to a soft drink. See here, here, and here.
5 Comments
ksplawn · 16 March 2012
Perhaps they turned to drinking to get over the shock of being presented with a decapitated partner.
eamon.knight · 16 March 2012
[MRA]It's all those b*****s who won't give me a shag who are responsible for me becoming an alcoholic![/MRA]
harold · 16 March 2012
I'm sure you meant to say "the fruit fly reward system is more sophisticated than you thought".
harold · 16 March 2012
Also, this doesn't mean that males who did mate preferred the "soft drink".
David A.Carlson · 16 March 2012
Dave Carlson | March 16, 2012 10:55 PM | Reply Actually its the organic chemistry of the whole thing that actually releases these responses in Drosophila melanogaster males. I helped identify, then was first to synthesize the mature female’s 27 carbon diene, (Z, Z)-7,11-heptacosadiene, the discovery of the first sex pheromone in this species. Other copounds previously inplicated turned out to be of much less bioactivity. Jean-Marc Jallon (yes- FRENCH) asked me to help him, as he had done the bioassay. So I did. Later I visited him, and stayed 3 nights in his left bank apartment, while he ran me all over Paris- my first visit. He stayed with his mother during this time. I read some of his Japanese erotic art books, also anime cartoon books. In the morning I was wakened each day by every wine bottle that had been emptied in the bar downstairs. They were being forcefully smashed into a metal bin, seemingly one at a time, starting at dawn. So I was well a awake by the time Jean-Marc came to fetch me for an involved walk, bus, underground,train ride to his molecular biology lab way up the river. It’s still amusing that molecular biologists will go was out of their way to avoid noticing/admitting that plain old organic compounds release such behaviours…and little is known how— thru enzyme systems obviously. If the females are mated, they still have the sex pheromone on their cuticle, but they don’t want to play! Anyway you can look this up. Several papers including J.-M. Jallon, D.A. Carlson et al., all was published first on D. melanogaster variety Canton S. 8^)
5 Comments
ksplawn · 16 March 2012
Perhaps they turned to drinking to get over the shock of being presented with a decapitated partner.
eamon.knight · 16 March 2012
[MRA]It's all those b*****s who won't give me a shag who are responsible for me becoming an alcoholic![/MRA]
harold · 16 March 2012
I'm sure you meant to say "the fruit fly reward system is more sophisticated than you thought".
harold · 16 March 2012
Also, this doesn't mean that males who did mate preferred the "soft drink".
David A.Carlson · 16 March 2012
Dave Carlson | March 16, 2012 10:55 PM | Reply
Actually its the organic chemistry of the whole thing that actually releases these responses in Drosophila melanogaster males. I helped identify, then was first to synthesize the mature female’s 27 carbon diene, (Z, Z)-7,11-heptacosadiene, the discovery of the first sex pheromone in this species. Other copounds previously inplicated turned out to be of much less bioactivity. Jean-Marc Jallon (yes- FRENCH) asked me to help him, as he had done the bioassay. So I did. Later I visited him, and stayed 3 nights in his left bank apartment, while he ran me all over Paris- my first visit. He stayed with his mother during this time. I read some of his Japanese erotic art books, also anime cartoon books. In the morning I was wakened each day by every wine bottle that had been emptied in the bar downstairs. They were being forcefully smashed into a metal bin, seemingly one at a time, starting at dawn. So I was well a awake by the time Jean-Marc came to fetch me for an involved walk, bus, underground,train ride to his molecular biology lab way up the river. It’s still amusing that molecular biologists will go was out of their way to avoid noticing/admitting that plain old organic compounds release such behaviours…and little is known how— thru enzyme systems obviously. If the females are mated, they still have the sex pheromone on their cuticle, but they don’t want to play! Anyway you can look this up. Several papers including J.-M. Jallon, D.A. Carlson et al., all was published first on D. melanogaster variety Canton S. 8^)
Dave