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April 13, 2011 02:04 pm PDT
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/HYUEfAUfVes/headless-flies-respo.html
Headless flies respond to light—Or: Why invertebrates are awesome
This is possibly the best opening line to a peer-reviewed research paper that I have ever read: When I tell people I've been working on headless fruit flies' responses to light, they often look puzzled or laugh nervously. Allow me briefly to explain why I started cutting off flies' heads. In this highly readable paper by Marc Egeth, we learn that flies continue to respond to light under conditions where they shouldn't be able to—namely, when their phyiscal movement is dulled by high doses of anesthesia, and (more astoundingly) when their heads have been severed from their bodies. This has some implications for the anesthesia—obviously, it doesn't completely restrict movement, so it would be interesting to know whether it's dulling pain as much as we think it is. But it also raises some questions about what the heck is going on with the flies' sensory perception. Egeth has two theories. Prepare to get your mind blown a bit, on several subjects:...
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/HYUEfAUfVes/headless-flies-respo.html
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