Credits: Social Media
Scientists have created flies they can stop in their tracks �with red light
With implications far beyond controlling fly behavior, its hardly a giant imaginary leap from halting flies in their tracks to controlling the movement of much larger animals&
Some of the weirder and more remarkable science-ish stories to emerge in 2024 include the discovery that testicles have taste receptors and that spending 30 minutes a day being sassy has the potential to transform your mental health. Now its time to imagine a utopian future in which no one is ever plagued by the persistent buzz of a housefly and a dystopian one in which scientists have put the mechanism of stopping to more nefarious use.�
Scientists have decoded the mechanisms of stopping
At the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, theres a scientist named Salil Bidaye, whose specialism is the fruit fly.
He uses the humble fruit fly to investigate how neural circuit activity �the stuff that happens in the brain that the likes of you and me will never really understand �leads to precise and complex behaviors in the real world.
Stopping is as important as going, he says, in the writeup to his and his teams study.�
It is central to important behaviors like eating, mating, and avoiding harm. In all these activities, youve got to know when to stop. Otherwise, youll a) walk past a prime foraging spot, b) exhaust yourself and others, and c) waltz right into danger.
In their research, Dr Bidaye and his team found that shining a red light in a particular way could activate specific neurons in a fruit flys brain, causing freely walking flies to stop. Just like that.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana
The fly brain has provided insight into how contextual information engages specific mechanisms of behaviors such as stopping, Dr Bidaye says. The study was published on October 2, 2024.
Bidaye explains that their hope for the future is to understand how the stopping mechanism all animals appear to have works in larger animals, such as humans.
Understanding the neural circuits that fire in specific contexts, and how they work together with other mechanisms, is key to understanding complex behaviors, Dr Bidaye concludes.
With any luck, that doesnt involve developing a type of light an evil mastermind could use to control the movements of entire populations. George Orwell would have a field day
Luckily, theres no indication that this is possible, let alone feasible. So, for now at least, lets let fruit flies be fruit flies, and fruit fly researchers be fruit fly researchers. Hey, someone’s got to do it.
