Gay worm
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Considering these behaviours are found in almost every branch of the evolutionary tree, it seems highly unlikely that they are limited to just a few hundred species out of some 2.13 million named to date. “She doesn’t need to mate [with a male] to have progeny,” but can fertilize her own eggs. This was an incredibly controversial statement to make at the time and was met with fierce resistance.
But Gadeau de Kerville didn’t back down.
At this time there was very little public awareness of queer behaviour in animals, and one of the prevailing arguments against homosexuality was that it was ‘unnatural’ and so ‘against God’s will’. They concluded that these nests were tended by two female birds that had formed a lesbian pairing, courted, laid eggs and raised young together.
Studying the colony of western gulls for three years, they found that out of the 1,200 gull pairs studied, up to 14% were same-sex.
“The [same-sex attraction] behavior is part of the nervous system.”
The study was published online Thursday, Oct. 25 in Current Biology, and will run in the journal’s Nov. 6 print edition.
"The conclusion is that sexual attraction is wired into brain circuits common to both sexes of worms, and is not caused solely by extra nerve cells added to the male or female brain,” says laboratory leader and biology Professor Erik Jorgensen, scientific director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
“The reason males and females behave differently is that the same nerve cells have been rewired to alter sexual preference,” he adds.
When the House of Representatives debated the National Science Foundation’s budget in 1978 (the NSF had partly funded the research), the gull research was referenced and the budget held up for 10 days.
Emerging recognition of sexual diversity in nature
Despite the protestations of the religious and conservative right, the scientists were not put off.
One of the males used its ‘penis’, known as the ‘aedeagus’, to penetrate the other through its reproductive opening, pushing the receiving male’s aedeagus back into its body cavity. The fem-3 gene makes the body develop male structures such as a tail, which male worms use for copulation. It could simply be that seabirds are a fairly well-studied group of birds, or it could relate to their colony nesting antics, which allow scientists to easily observe a large number of birds and keep track of relationships.
He published a long rebuttal in response to this backlash, doubling down on his assertions. Regardless of background, beliefs, or interests, we come together through our shared appreciation for the Kandi culture and the spirit of connection. That shows “the nervous system can compensate for lost neurons as it goes through puberty,” Jorgensen says.
“Normally there are eight sensory neurons in nematodes,” says White.
“We found instead that the brain – which is the same in young males and hermaphrodites – is rewired during the worm equivalent of puberty – the fourth larval stage – to make the males attracted to hermaphrodites.”
“What we show is that the shared nervous system [common between male and hermaphrodite] is broadly sexualized,” and sexual attraction can be changed by essentially flipping a genetic switch in that common brain, he adds.
The study involved these key experiments:
-- The researchers used laser microsurgery to kill the male-only CEM neurons in young larval males.
But an evolutionary biologist will consider this to be a potentially common mechanism for sexual attraction.”
“We cannot say what this means for human sexual orientation, but it raises the possibility that sexual preference is wired in the brain,” Jorgensen says. The involvement of the core neurons was a surprise.
“We thought the extra CEM neurons provided sexual preference” because fourth-stage males are not attracted to hermaphrodites but adult males are, Jorgensen says.
It seems possible that if sexual orientation is genetically wired in worms, it would be in people too. But this time he questioned the assumption that the sex was somehow ‘forced’ by a dominant penetrating partner.
Osten-Sacken noted that the complexity of the coupling meant that what he would call the ‘passive’ beetle was clearly willing.
The study was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation.
The Rules of Attraction – for Worms
Nematodes, or C. elegans, are millimeter-long (one twenty-fifth of an inch) worms that live in soil and eat bacteria. This includes animals from right across the tree of life: Hawaiian orb weaver spiders and common slipper shells, house flies, nematode worms and Humbolt squid, wood turtles, blackstripe topminnows, Guianan cock of-the-rocks and brown bears.
But this figure is likely a massive underestimate.
Let's build bridges, not walls, and learn from one another.