Interpreting animal behavior first and foremost through its similarity to our own, and implying underlying reasons that resonate with the human condition, is a tired and overused habit not just among reporters but even more in the general populace and sometimes scientists too. But sometimes there just is no alternative. How can one hear that male fruit flies after being deliberately put through prolonged sexual frustration develop a powerful thirst for alcohol and NOT have the similes and word play options light up the brain? Bar flies! Drinking their loneliness away! Drowning their lovelorn sorrows in straight shots! Just like us, especially in sit-coms.
There just is no alternative. It will be read widely and spur office talk and email-sharing, with jokes. It has genuine (not merely humorously imagined) implications for understanding human as well as insect neuroscience and stimulus response. Authors are highly-credentialed, from the esteemed UC San Francisco medical research complex and while the lead author has left, she’s now at the perhaps more esteemed Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Virginia campus. The report is in, as it is so often phrased, the “prestigious journal Science.” Those reporters granted entry to the embargo-toting AAAS SciPak advance news service are provided with the paper’s full text, two press releases, and a video of males who succeed with the females doing it with presumed satisfaction, of those who don’t facing kicks and extruded ovipositors in response to their stalking and, for days, a lot of buzz-off, buddy in fly language. Then is shows the spurned ones choosing the drinking tube with the hard stuff in it while the happily laid guys took things easy. As Malcolm Ritter at the AP put it after he filed his story, “What more can a science writer ask for?”
The news is amusing, instructive, and harmless. There is nothing here to analyze deeply. It’ll be interesting to see if anybody called around for expert reactions even though there is no urgent reason to do so. If nothing else, the varied heds and such are worth a sampling. There is, by the way, no hint the researchers have found, or tried to find, whether sexually frustrated female fruit flies act this way. Maybe it’s hard to find males that would spurn them.
Other Stories:
- Agence France-Presse via Ottawa Citizen: Jilted fruit flies drown their sorrows/ Rejected males drink more than sexually satisfied ones, study finds ; Not sure ‘jilted’ is right on target. Close though. No fun being stood up. But it usually happens a little upstream of the, um, the move when the time seems right.
- Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Sex-starved fruit flied turn to alcohol, researchers find ; Good idea here. Berger states the bare fly-facts up top and lets readers do all the inevitable anthropomorphizing themselves. Then he hits them with a serious third graf: “Although it’s tempting to speculate what frustrated flies turning to drink reveals about men, women and bars, scientists say the real value in the new research is that it brings us closer to understanding precisely how the minds of flies work.” Yes ….. back to serious, even if it is a party pooper.
- Wall Street Journal – Jonathan D. Rockoff: Sex, Alcohol and Fruit Flies: An Experiment ; Oh I was tempted to make a gag about the writer’s .. oh, never mind. You’ll do it for me.
- LiveScience – Jennifer Welsh: How Booze Takes the Edge Off … for Rejected Flies ; Smartly, she points out near the top that the scenario is not all that artificial. She writes, parenthetically, “Flies have no trouble finding alcohol, which is created by their favorite food: yeast on rotting fruit.” She then gets neatly into neuropeptides and the chemistry of alcoholic humans.
- NYTimes – Benedict Carey: Learning from the Spurned and Tipsy Fruit Fly ; Carey embraces the Drosophila m. – Homo s. parallel, declaring with a tincture of hyperbole “Fruit flies apparently self-medicate just like many humans do, drowning their sorrow or frustration for some of the same reasons.” Where stepped off course was upon writing “just like” when “a lot like” or even better, “somewhat like” hit the spot better. Carey is among the few who rang up an outsider or two: one at the NIH, who endorses the study, and another with good things to say, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA.
- Medical Daily – Christine Hsu: Sex-Deprived Flies Turn to Alchohol, Drink Four Times More than Others ; Very nice job relating all the variants of the experiment that were run to rule out possible confounding factors – like maybe male flies were just pooped from all the fruitless chasing, so they had a drink. One that went through the cold shoulder routine for days, and then got lucky, did not then tend toward spiked punch.
- ScienceNOW – Sarah C. P. Williams: Sexually Rejected Flies Turn to Booze ; She turns immediately to an outside opinion. The source says, “…amazing…”.
- Nature.com – Ed Yong: Rejected flies turn to booze ; Neither did the booze hound come out if the frustrated flies got a dose of the neuropeptide that naturally surges after having alcohol or sex.Ergo, Yong speculates, a door to a treatment for drug-alcohol yens may have opened a little wider.
- Scientific American – Christie Wilcox: Sexually deprived Drosophila become bar flies ; With a perfect selection from Ani DiFranco’s portfolio, and a spot-on and dumb photo mashup. And she declares, with personal experience apparently in mind, that rejection hurts and that’s no metaphor.
- New Scientist – Andy Coghlan: Jilted flies drown their sorrows with alcohol ;
- International Business Times – Roxanne Palmer: Heartbroken Fruit Flies Self-Medicate With Alcohol ; She finds another study that links fruit fly larvae to an urge for alcohol. But it has not to do with sex, but with the larvae of tiny wasps.
- Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Sex-Deprived Male Fruit Flies Turn to Alcohol, Research Shows ;
Grist for the Mill: US San Francisco Press Release ; University of Missouri Press Release ;
– Charlie Petit
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