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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."
I guess if I were a sexually-deprived fly I would be drinking too... just like I do as a sexually-deprived basement dweller
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
It's just to make the un-attractive fruit flies around look better.
Probably like most /. readers, he needs the alcohol to get up the nerve to approach the female fly.
... fruit flies like a bottle of booze.
Nerdy fly fetishes of the world, your time is now! The fly on fly doggy style action shot is just...
::notices the wife unit enter the room::
Uh... oh... hi honey! Oh no, I only read ScienceMag for the articles... !
...do the flies give up and turn to World of Warcraft?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It must suck to be sexually rejected AND lack hands.
Have gnu, will travel.
I read it as "Sexually Rejected Files Turn To Booze". I was completely confounded for a moment until I expanded the summary, and saw the words "male fruit fly", which I read correctly.
Bizarre.... I don't typically have dyslexic moments.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is only because the flies don't know how to give the alcohol soaked food to the female flies first.
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?
There are over 75,000 alcohol related deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Is that enough to warrant some research?
Maybe a significant number of those deaths were actually sexual-rejection-related deaths after all. Mothers Against Sexual Rejection, anyone?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
another drunk
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?
While you perhaps could have been more eloquent, you have a point. Malnutrition is a terrible problem and needs to be more effectively addressed on an international level. Allowing people fleeing hunger in their home country refugee status in other countries would help, as would more thoughtful subsidy policy, better access to seeds and fertilizers, less social stigma about being poor, and more efficient use of existing resources. To be fair, the number of malnurished people has generally declined over the last several decades as a fraction of world population so something is being done about the problem, but there's still nearly a billion people (yes, three times the population of the US) who suffer from malnutrition each year.
On the other hand, there several arguments in favor of this research:
* One never knows when and where pure research will pay off. Science builds on previous work, so who knows what will become of this? Is it inconceivable that a more effective method of dealing with mosquito-borne malaria might come of this? That's just one possible route to an application out of innumerable ones, most of which I can't conceive of now.
* Many believe knowledge has intrinsic value beyond practical applications. I agree. Stupidity is humanity's single worst plague, and it is fought with both knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. Spreading science--which ideally embodies evidenced-based, rigorous reasoning--by funding scientists fights stupidity effectively (though scientists could stand to be better communicators, on the whole).
* Other branches of academic research have even less hope of achieving applicability. Literary analysis and some corners of math and theoretical physics come to mind. Why pick on this one?
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.