MALE fruit flies can smell females with their legs, say researchers in the
US.
Claudio Pikielny of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New
Jersey, and his colleagues tinkered with a Drosophila gene called
Bergerac1. The gene is expressed only in a few cells on the chemosensory
hairs on a male’s front legs, which suggests it helps males pick up female
courtship pheromones.
Fruit flies can also detect these pheromones with their antennae. But the
researchers found that removing a male fruit fly’s antennae didn’t make him
insensitive to pheromones from the opposite sex—his legs could still scent…
