Gay worm
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What was unusual about this partnering, apart from the fact that it was cross-species, was that both beetles appeared to be male.
It is surprisingly easy to tell the difference between male and female maybugs – males have much larger, fluffier antenna. Lesbian pairings have also been found in Antarctic petrel and Cory’s shearwater, which represent the first known species of burrow-nesting seabirds to show queer behaviour.
Perhaps the most well-known same-sex pairings in the bird world are those of the albatrosses.
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. Found throughout much of central Europe, they have a long history and deep cultural connection with the region, primarily as a once significant agricultural pest. He built on Osten-Sacken’s remarks and made the argument that homosexual behaviour observed between male cockchafer beetles came in two forms: necessity and preference.
Gadeau de Kerville posited that male beetles kept together would likely have sex out of necessity, but that there was also clear evidence that, even in mixed environments, some males still chose to mate with each other.
He even went so far as to say that this behaviour “also took place among the higher vertebrates“, almost certainly a loosely coded reference to humans.
How gay is nature, really? One headline ran “Your tax $$ wasted to study gay gulls”, while a group out of New York published a statement claiming that “100% of the sea gulls in the five boroughs of New York City were heterosexual”, presumably trying to imply that the queer gulls were a Californian quirk.
It didn’t stop there.
“She doesn’t need to mate [with a male] to have progeny,” but can fertilize her own eggs. “You can take away seven of the eight prior to sexual maturation, and as long as there is one left, he can still be sexually attracted. “Humans are subject to evolutionary forces just like worms. 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’.
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. Despite this, Kelch initially thought that it couldn’t be two male beetles and was more likely a pairing between a male and a female with male antenna, perhaps in a similar way to how some female hens and pheasants have been known to develop male plumage.
But upon dissection he discovered the truth – these were indeed two male cockchafer beetles.
This includes listening actively, acknowledging different perspectives, and refraining from personal attacks, harassment, or any behavior that diminishes another person's worth. Hermaphrodites with masculine brains “were attracted to other hermaphrodites.”
The results show sexual orientation is wired into the brain in both sexes of worm.
To masculinize the brains of hermaphroditic worms, the researchers activated a gene named fem-3, but only in the nervous system.
Jorgensen and White loosely refer to hermaphrodites as females because they produce offspring.
“A hermaphrodite makes both eggs and sperm,” Jorgensen says. He backed this assertion up with the fact that, in a number of cases, the ‘passive’ beetle was also the larger of the two insects. 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 [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.
The worms gain these neurons during their version of puberty, their fourth larval stage. Let's build bridges, not walls, and learn from one another.
If the antenna hadn’t given things away, the act looked like two heterosexual beetles mating.
Explaining the gay away
Kelch and his colleagues tried to rationalize what they were seeing, writing “thus it was clear that Melolontha [melonlontha], as the larger and stronger of the two, had forced itself on the smaller and weaker male forest cockchafer, had exhausted it and only because of this dominance had conquered it, so to speak”.
This initial notion – that despite the tell-tale antenna, the penetrated individual must have been a female – was echoed again and again over the years as more reports of queer cockchafers surfaced.
Because the same genes are found in many animals, nematodes, mice, zebrafish and fruit flies often are used as “models” for humans in research.
Nematode worms lack eyes, so attraction is based only on the sense of smell. 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.
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Scientists alter sexual orientation in worms
University of Utah biologists genetically manipulated nematode worms so the animals were attracted to worms of the same sex – part of a study that shows sexual orientation is wired in the creatures’ brains.
“They look like girls, but act and think like boys,” says Jamie White, a postdoctoral researcher and first author of the new study.