How Fruit Flies Know Not To Get It On With The Wrong Species
D. melanogaster Wikimedia Commons It's all about a tender leg rub, ladies. All cats are gray in the dark, as the ever-wise and ever-lecherous Ben Franklin put it. But how do you figure out if that cat is actually a dog? Scientists don't entirely understand how animals know not to get it on with another species, a evolutionarily useless process that would at best lead to hybrid animals that probably wouldn't survive (or would be sterile, like like mules). So what stops animals from trying to have sex with animals they can't reproduce with? For the fruit fly, apparently, it's all in the leg. Researchers have discovered that sensory neurons in the foreleg of male fruit flies allow them to actually taste whether the female they're chatting up is of the right species. The discovery is published in a paper online this week in the journal Cell. When approaching a nice-looking...