Worms are decomposition devices. Many survive by destroying dead bacteria, dead plants, dead animals, dead things, and more. So they must be used to the stench of death. Not so, new research suggests – not when a dead creature is another worm.
Published in Current Biology, This study states that C. Elegance Roundworms react inversely to the smell of their deceased counterparts. This odor evokes not only a behavioral response of corpse avoidance, but also a physiological response of increased short-term fertility and a reduction in long-term fitness and lifespan.
“caenorhabditis elegans ” Avoid dead homologous species,” or the author, a deceased member of the same species, states in his study, where worms react to death with a series of “aversion” and “survival” reactions.
read more: These fruits aged faster after seeing death
Worms detect death as a signal
C. Elegance It’s not just small creatures that react to the dead. For example, while fruit fly, ants and bees dispose of the deceased from the colony Avoid the corpses (And it avoids flies that have seen the corpse in itself). After seeing the dead counterpart, fruit experiences faster aging and has a shorter lifespan than when they had not met death.
It is widely documented that these animals respond very strongly to the deaths. Therefore, when the authors of new research notice C. Elegance The worms sway from the corpse, and the reaction was seen as an opportunity to dig deeper into death signals and detection. Certainly, the response to death of many species is primarily mediated by vision, but that certainly did not apply to wiggling roundworms that have no vision.
“I felt this was a very unique opportunity to start jumping into what was happening mechanically. C. Elegance To detect dead conscriptions,” said Matthias Trattman, senior research author and physiologist at the University of Michigan. press release.
Decide how to do that C. Elegance The worm detected the deaths, and Tratman and his team exposed the worm to the same species of corpses and liquids harvested from the degraded cells of those bodies. The worm responded to both with evasion, separated regardless of age or gender, suggesting that the corpses and liquids carried similar death signatures.
These death cues resulted in short-term increases in fertility rates, long-term decreases in fitness (expressed by lower thrashing rates), and long-term decreases in life expectancy. But what exactly were those death clues, and how did the worm pick them up?
read more: Ants may cut off other ants to save them – is this a sign of empathy?
Sounds the sensory alarm
To understand what these cues are, the research authors recorded activity in worm sensory neurons when they encountered corpses or fluids. Records show that two neurons that cause the sensation of olfactory stimuli, AWB and ASH, are activated when the corpse and fluid are present, indicating that the worm smells of death signatures.
“It is well known that the neurons we identify are involved in behavioral responses to cues from different environments,” Truttmann said in the release.
According to the study authors, metabolite amps and histidine were probably responsible for the death signal. C. Elegance Recognized worms. These metabolites are usually found in live cells, but are released when they die and deteriorate. In this case, it triggers behavioral and physiological responses. C. Elegance.
“They also detect some intracellular metabolites that are not commonly found in the environment. If they are around, they indicate that the cell has died and opened, and that something is wrong,” Truttmann said in the release.
Cellular metabolites can also function as signals for the death of other organisms, Truttmann said. For example, the release of metabolites from cells that collapsed and collapsed in one tissue can cause changes in other tissues in humans.
It is still unclear whether this signal will sound an alarm for other creatures. Further research is needed to understand the role of cellular metabolites in detecting species death, but for now, death is a sensitive subject; C. Elegance.
read more: Animals respond to death in many ways. Mourning may be one of them
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering evolution for archaeology, paleontology, ecology and discovery, and has an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
