The University of Manchester is to play host to a major international conference — on maggots! The Manchester Maggot Meeting will see delegates from across Europe, the United States, Japan and South America descend on the city to talk about their research on fruit-fly (Drosophila) larvae.
The three-day event has been organised by Dr Matthew Cobb, a lecturer in animal behaviour in the University’s Faculty of Life Sciences whose interest lies in the maggots’ sense of smell.
“Scientists have been studying fruit flies for 100 years and they have proven a very powerful tool in our current understanding of how genetics works.
“The first genes involved in biological clocks that help us know what time of day it is were discovered in fruit flies, as were the genes involved in the biological processes of learning and how organisms grow and develop from that initial single cell.”
“The emphasis is on behaviour — how the nerves and genes interact to influence activity and how behaviour changes over time. The only drawback to studying maggots is that you don’t have long as they turn into flies in three days.”
No comment.
And you couldn’t find a picture of the Maggot from Corpse Bride for this post??
“Being a maggot, I am nothing more than a moving embryo, putting all my effort in feeding on food readily available, since my mother laid me on a good fruit. I am stupid and can’t show much behavior choice.”
That’s about what normal people (and also some scientist) would think of the life of a maggot and part of it is true: maggot behaviour is mainly directed toward feeding, and their behavior repertoire is quite limited (crawling here or there, eating or not eating). But life is not so simple, especially fruit fly maggot life.
As we heard in this meeting from Raul Godoy-Herera -a scientist that looked at maggot in the field, to the “real life” of a maggot- a fruit is not a uniformus environment, nor is it a stable one. Maggot have to choose to go to a safe place with a lot of good nutriments and in particular good pH. Bertram Gerber gave another example of the particularly subtle behavior of these maggots: He nicely presented an experiment showing that those larvae not only can associate an odor with a good or bad situation, but that they use this information only in certain conditions: if they are faced with a bad situation.
Those are just two examples of what scientists have already discovered looking more carefully at fruit fly maggots, this so promising model system…
So next time you see one of those maggots: don’t say it is a stupid moving embryo, but stare at it and you’ll realised, like I did, how facinating this small litlle animal is.