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Sexually Rejected Flies Turn To Booze
sciencehabit writes "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."
Another scientific reason for women to say we arw the lowest form of life and reject us. Pepe Lopez, here I come.
Silence is a state of mime.
people die, yet we study the drinking habits of fruit-fly
There are over 75,000 alcohol related deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Is that enough to warrant some research?
Except they identified a particular protein that is created in these depressed males that causes them to turn to alcohol. Considering ~50% of fly proteins have homologs in humans, it may be a good target for drugs in the future. Still think it's a useless study?
One of the interesting things I learned from reading Mary Roach's *Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex* (ISBN-13: 978-0393064643) is that it's very difficult for researchers to get funding for research that has anything to do with sex. Scientists resort to stratagems like including "physiology" in study titles, or simply paying for their research out of their own pocket.
You oughtn't have to make a special "applicability" argument to research on sex, given that it is not only an important part of human welfare, it's fundamental to the survival of most life forms on Earth. Anything like that *other* than sex would not be controversial in the least. We don't demand an immediate explanation of why a researcher is interested in anatomy, genetics, nutrition or non-reproductive physiology, but sex research is automatically assumed frivolous until proven otherwise.
Now I wouldn't want to draw too confident a physiological or genetic parallel between Drosophila melanogaster and human behavior. Perhaps we'll find out it is mere coincidence that alcohol plays a special role in Drosophila reproductive behavior (these are *fruit* flies, after all). That it has humorous parallels with human reproductive behavior doesn't negate the scientific value of knowing more about this extremely important research species.
On the other hand, there might be something other than coincidence at work here, and that would be *very* significant.
In either case, our discomfort with our *own* reproductive behavior has no bearing on the scientific value of research like this.
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