For Fruit Flies, Alcohol Really Is Mommy's Little Helper

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Alcohol: a key babyproofing product for this little mother.

Alcohol: a key babyproofing product for this little mother.

Many a mom has reached for a glass of wine after a long day of tending children. But only fruit fly moms use their version of Chardonnay to guard their babies from harm.

When fly moms see marauding wasps, they seek out the alcohol in fermenting fruit, and lay their eggs there, according to new research. The alcohol is toxic to the wasps, but not to the fruit flies. They've evolved a tolerance for hooch.

No only do the fruit flies babyproof with alcohol, when given a choice they'll pick just the right proof about 3 percent. That's considerably less than the 12 to 14 percent in a glass of wine, but evidently enough to do in those lightweight wasps.

This news comes from Todd Schlenke, a evolutionary geneticist at Emory University who is making a bit of a specialty of studying the relationship between fruit flies and booze. His study was published in the journal Science.

A year ago, he reported that fruit-fly larvae will self-medicate with alcohol if they've been attacked by a wasp. The wasps lay eggs in the flies, and the alcohol kills the wasp larvae, saving the fly's life.

But some wasps are learning how to hold their liquor, Schlenke says, and the fruit flies may need to turn to more potent drink or figure out another survival strategy.

"It's sort of an arms race, I think," Schlenke says. "The flies do something to avoid being infected, and the wasps learn how to get around it."

Anthropomorphizing can be slippery, but it's hard not to feel a certain sympathy for these lowly fruit flies, whose drinking habits seem to echo ours in so many ways. For instance, it looks like fruit flies also turn to the bottle to nurse heartache. When a male fruit fly fails to mate with a female, he'll be more likely to start slugging down ethanol than the guy who scored, according to a study last year.

So why spend so much time hanging out with these "bar" flies? Schlenke studies the tiny flies to learn about big things like memory, heredity, and evolution.

For example, the mother fruit fly's ability to spot dangerous wasps is so refined that she'll only head for liquor when they see a female parasitic wasp (the males pose no threat to the young). "They only have to see the wasp once, and they remember," Schlenke says.

And even though the fruit flies have been living in the laboratory for many, many generations, they have no problem recognizing the danger posed by a wasp the moment they see it.

Ah, science!

Schlenke's revelations on the drinking habits of fruit flies have not only landed him in prestigious journals like Science, they've earned him a hat-tip from the satirical newspaper The Onion, which quipped, "I'm sure at least some of those flies also drink because of their crippling depression."

"Honestly, I think maybe The Onion is the highlight of my career," Schlenke told The Salt.

We bet the fruit flies will drink to that.

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Fruit Fly Nose Says Steer Clear Of Deadly Food; Human Nose Not So Reliable

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Now we know why we'll never see a common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) sitting on a beet.

Now we know why we'll never see a common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) sitting on a beet.

The earthy smell of a fresh beet may spark delicious thoughts for us, but for a fruit fly, that smell screams danger.

Geosmin, a naturally occurring chemical that gives beets, fresh soil and corked wine their distinctive smell, is also cranked out by bacteria deadly to fruit flies. And it turns out that the tiny flies have a direct pathway from nose to brain made just to detect that smell and avoid the toxic microbes that produce it.

When Bill Hansson, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and his crew blocked the geosmin-detecting pathway in flies, they ate contaminated food and died. With the pathway intact, they steered clear. The fact that the tiny fly is devoting precious neuronal real estate to this shows how important it has been for survival to be able to detect the smell of spoiled food.

"They have one line for their whole nervous system just telling about this," Hansson tells The Salt. "On their nose they have cells only detecting this. We tested 3,000 compounds and only got a response to geosmin. That's an amazing specificity." His article was published in the journal Cell.

This is the first evidence of a special dedicated pathway for food odor, Hansson says. Animals are also very sensitive to smells that are sexual signals. But those are blends of pheromones, rather than a single smell.

People don't have a dedicated pathway to detect geosmin. That may be because those microbes don't pose a threat to us. Also, humans have many times more smell receptors than fruit flies. And we eat a much broader range of foods. Some of us even like beets.

In fact, geosmin can be a pleasant smell: Think about a farmer's field being plowed in the spring, or the garden just after it rains. But it's also responsible for the funky smell that sometimes troubles municipal water systems. (Supertasters may be able to smell germs in their sinuses, according to a recent study, but most of us don't have that talent.)

But the poor grad student who worked with the flies picked up a moldy geosmin stink that followed him around the laboratory. "It really doesn't smell nice," Hansson said. "You can smell him down the corridor."

There's no question that humans and other mammals react strongly to the smell of spoiled food. Just opening the office refrigerator is usually enough to prompt an "ugh!" or sometimes worse. But unfortunately, people don't have the ability to recognize the smell of dangerous bugs like E. coli or salmonella.

Still, this research could prove useful to humans. If dedicated smell pathways like the fruit fly's geosmin detector could be found in insects that pose a threat to humans mosquitoes, say, or agricultural pests like the corn borer Hansson thinks they could be used to develop repellents that would be safer than pesticides.

What smell screams danger to Hansson? Not geosmin, but the smell of vomit. Hansson remembers a long car trip in his native Sweden. His young son threw up in the back seat. Hansson found the hours spent smelling even the faintest remains of that smell to be excruciating. "It's such a strong stimulus. And it's one we don't adapt to. It's telling us someone has eaten something that made them sick. That's an important evolutionary signal."

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Fruitfly Nose Says Steer Clear Of Deadly Food, Human Nose Not So Reliable

Enlarge image

Now we know why we'll never see a common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) sitting on a beet.

Now we know why we'll never see a common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) sitting on a beet.

The earthy smell of a fresh beet may spark delicious thoughts for us, but for a fruit fly, that smell screams danger.

Geosmin, a naturally occurring chemical that gives beets, fresh soil and corked wine their distinctive smell, is also cranked out by bacteria deadly to fruit flies. And it turns out that the tiny flies have a direct pathway from nose to brain made just to detect that smell and avoid the toxic microbes that produce it.

When Bill Hansson, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and his crew blocked the geosmin-detecting pathway in flies, they ate contaminated food and died. With the pathway intact, they steered clear. The fact that the tiny fly is devoting precious neuronal real estate to this shows how important it has been for survival to be able to detect the smell of spoiled food.

"They have one line for their whole nervous system just telling about this," Hansson tells The Salt. "On their nose they have cells only detecting this. We tested 3,000 compounds and only got a response to geosmin. That's an amazing specificity." His article was published in the journal Cell.

This is the first evidence of a special dedicated pathway for food odor, Hansson says. Animals are also very sensitive to smells that are sexual signals. But those are blends of pheromones, rather than a single smell.

People don't have a dedicated pathway to detect geosmin. That may be because those microbes don't pose a threat to us. Also, humans have many times more smell receptors than fruit flies. And we eat a much broader range of foods. Some of us even like beets.

In fact, geosmin can be a pleasant smell: Think about a farmer's field being plowed in the spring, or the garden just after it rains. But it's also responsible for the funky smell that sometimes troubles municipal water systems. (Supertasters may be able to smell germs in their sinuses, according to a recent study, but most of us don't have that talent.)

But the poor grad student who worked with the flies picked up a moldy geosmin stink that followed him around the laboratory. "It really doesn't smell nice," Hansson said. "You can smell him down the corridor."

There's no question that humans and other mammals react strongly to the smell of spoiled food. Just opening the office refrigerator is usually enough to prompt an "ugh!" or sometimes worse. But unfortunately, people don't have the ability to recognize the smell of dangerous bugs like E. coli or salmonella.

Still, this research could prove useful to humans. If dedicated smell pathways like the fruit fly's geosmin detector could be found in insects that pose a threat to humans mosquitoes, say, or agricultural pests like the corn borer Hansson thinks they could be used to develop repellents that would be safer than pesticides.

What smell screams danger to Hansson? Not geosmin, but the smell of vomit. Hansson remembers a long car trip in his native Sweden. His young son threw up in the back seat. Hansson found the hours spent smelling even the faintest remains of that smell to be excruciating. "It's such a strong stimulus. And it's one we don't adapt to. It's telling us someone has eaten something that made them sick. That's an important evolutionary signal."

---

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