Worms can smell death, and strangely, it changes their fertility and fitness

Worms are decomposed. Many survive by setting down dead things – dead bacteria, dead plants, dead animals, dead. So you must be used to the stench of death. A new study does not suggest – not if the dead organism is another worm.

Published in Current biologyPresent The study says that C. Elegans Roundworms react adversely to the smell of a deceased counterpart. This smell not only relies on a behavioral reaction of the body avoidance, but also arises from a physiological reaction of increased short-term fertility and a reduced long-term fitness and lifespan.

“Caenorhabditis Elegans Prefers to avoid dead ways ”or deceased members of the same species. The authors state in the study.

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Worms signal and recognize death

C. Elegans Roundworms are not the only little organisms that react to the dead. Ants and bees dispose of the deceased from their colonies, for example while fruit flies fly Avoid corpse (And Shun Flies who have seen corpses themselves). Obstflies with duration of death even age faster after seeing a deceased counterpart, and have a shorter lifespan than those who had no encounters with death.

It is widespread that these animals react so strongly to the dead. So when the authors of the new study noticed C. Elegans Worms jerk off from corpses, they saw the reaction as an opportunity to dig deeper into death signaling and detection. While the reactions of many types of death are mainly conveyed by vision, this was certainly not the case that circular worms wobbled who have no eyes and no sense of vision.

“We believed that this was a fairly unique opportunity to dive into what happens mechanistically, which made it possible C. Elegans Find a dead conscription ” Press release.

To determine how C. Elegans The worms recognize the dead, Truttman and his team exposed the worms of the applicable corpses and liquids, which were removed from the deteriorating cells of these corpses. The worms reacted with avoidance and moved away independently of age and gender, which indicates that the corpses and liquids wore similar death signatures.

These deaths also led to short -term increase in fertility, to long -term decreases of fitness (represented by a reduced voice rate) and a long -term decrease in the lifespan. But what exactly were these death walls and how did the worms pick them up?

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Give a sensory alarm

In order to find out what these clues could be, the authors of the study recorded the activity in the sensory neurons of worms when they came across the corpses and liquids. The records showed that AWB and Ash, two neurons that are responsible for the meaning of olfactory stimuli were activated when the corpses and liquids were present, which indicates that the worms smelled the signature of death.

“The neurons we identify are known as behavioral reactions on a variety of environmental information,” said Truuttmann in the publication.

According to the authors of the study, the metabolites AMP and Histidin were probably responsible for the death signal that the C. Elegans Worms recognized. Although these metabolites are typically contained in living cells, they are released when living cells die and worsen – in this case the behavioral and physiological reactions in trigger C. Elegans.

“You also recognize a few intracellular metabolites that are normally not found in the environment. If you are nearby, this shows that a cell has died, has been open and that something went wrong,” said Truuttmann in the publication.

It is possible that cellular metabolites also serve as a death signal in other organisms, said Truttmann, since the release of metabolites from dying and destructive cells in a tissue can cause changes in the tissue, for example, in humans.

It is still uncertain whether this signal is the alarm in other organisms. While further examinations are necessary to understand the role of cellular metabolites in recognizing death between species, it is clear that death is a sensitive topic, even for worms like C. Elegans.

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Read more: Animals react to death in many ways. Grief could be one of them

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Article sources

Our authors at Discovermagazine.com Use peer review studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Check the sources used below for this article:

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Sam Walters is a journalist who covers archeology, paleontology, ecology and evolution for discover as well as a selection of other topics. Before Sam came to the discover team as deputy editor in 2022, Sam -Journalism studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.