JAN-27-2014 13:57 From:0zymandius Realty To: Page:1/1 NEWS LIFE & EVOLUTION Fly form of sexual frustration takes toll Whiff of female but no mating causes males to die young BY SUSAN MILIUS Smelling female fruit flies but not mat- ing with them can actually shorten males' lives. Drosophila melanogaster males not allowed to mate despite receiving tanta- lizing chemical sex messages lose about SS to 40 percent of their normal life span, says molecular geneticist Scott Pletcher of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. These males' fat stores also dwin- dle, and the flies prove less able to cope with starvation, Fletcher and his col- leagues report November 29 in Science. Creating the reciprocal situation of celibate females sniffing but not mating with males wasn't as easy, he say& But so far, experiments show female life span declining 15 to 20 percent too. This marks the second time Pletcher and colleagues have linked premature demise with frustrated expectations. Fruit flies on a low-calorie diet, which normally would lengthen lives and sus- tain health, lost some of the diet's ben- efits if the flies lived with the smell of food they couldn't eat, he and colleagues reported in 2007. Like a person salivating at the odor of a pie baking, flies pick up cues to likely events and start to prepare physically. Their brains may be monitoring the expected events as well as what the flies actuallyexperience, Fletcher speculates, and Thad things happen when they don't match up." To see whether odors of inaccessible mates would affect aging, Pletcher and his colleagues housed normal flies for two days or more with members of their own sex engineered to give off the dis- tinctive signaling scents of the opposite sex. That deception let researchers look at the effects of the odor alone without any confounding behavioral or visual cues from the opposite sex. Males escaped much of the damage of the frustrating experience If they c