Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Mating shorter, living happier.

People care about how long they can make it with their partners but flies are telling you that: it does not have to be that long!

A research about how nervous system affects the timing of mating reveals that on average, flies spend 27 min to finish the copulation but in fact, a ten-min copulation is good enough for most females to get enough sperms. There are six P element insertions into the same gene indicated that there are 8-12 neurons at the very tip of the ventral nerve cord which are responsible for determining how long the copulation is. If people silence these neurons, flies can spend hours on copulating. Surprisingly, decapitated males can finish the copulation process within 34 min on average, just slightly different from those controls. Does it mean that males do not think with their brains?

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