Cori BargmannI’m excited that Margaret Ebert’s postdoctoral work is out in Current Biology! This paper explores the ways mating behaviors differ between females and hermaphrodites. https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__authors.elsevier.com_sd_article_S0960-2D9822-2824-2900087-2D3&d=DwMFaQ&c=JeTkUgVztGMmhKYjxsy2rfoWYibK1YmxXez1G3oNStg&r=kGWJErNJo7fN0L1-etpxjVyd5wpAuwGrxU_YWX1OYbA&m=vg0aRq2g8QSFvw41XER_EOdynW_Rl6bIOXu816Td43Vp566oGs9-FLg30F0TfvWG&s=_9yvee-VCP_XX34gqubIBIDwpdEabPDP77bzxfX4X0s&e=
Margaret compared pairs of closely related species where one species is male/female and one is male/hermaphrodite. She found that females are highly motivated to mate. They chemotax to males, and cooperate with males during mating. They get less cooperative after they’ve been mated, though. Hermaphrodites are unmotivated and uncooperative. But why? Two reasons — they’ve lost a specific olfactory response, and their own sperm makes them think they’re “mated”.
Lots of cool things Margaret learned from making/studying different conditions and mutants: hermaphrodites become cooperative in mating once they run out of sperm, or if they never make sperm; males and females use the same neurons to chemotax to the opposite sex. And another hermaphrodite species becomes even more female-like in the response to males when sperm-depleted. Their nervous systems are simple, but these latent and flexible behaviors teach us not to underestimate our model organisms.
Nicole Rust@CoriBargmann
Really great!
Really great!