Thursday, July 7, 2022
SCIENMAG: Latest Science and Health News
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME PAGE
  • BIOLOGY
  • CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS
  • MEDICINE
    • Cancer
    • Infectious Emerging Diseases
  • SPACE
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME PAGE
  • BIOLOGY
  • CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS
  • MEDICINE
    • Cancer
    • Infectious Emerging Diseases
  • SPACE
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Scienmag - Latest science news from science magazine
No Result
View All Result
Home SCIENCE NEWS Chemistry AND Physics

For flour beetles, it’s better to be a woman in a man’s world

March 5, 2018
in Chemistry AND Physics
0
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
IMAGE

Credit: Ipsa Jain

In red flour beetle society, being a female in a male world is actually advantageous. Unlike humans, where this situation traditionally meant being at a disadvantage, female flour beetles in male-dominated groups seem to reproduce better and live longer than females in groups with equal sex ratios or in female-dominated groups.

Work from Deepa Agashe's group at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, demonstrates that this effect is mediated chemically by compounds from the beetles' stink glands. With help from Radhika Venkatesan's team, also from NCBS, the researchers have further discovered that the compounds responsible for this phenomenon–ethyl bezoquinone and methyl benzoquinone–are the weapons of choice for female flour beetles that seem to engage in chemical warfare to reduce each other's reproduction.

Tribolium castaneum, or the red flour beetle is a worldwide pest. The hardy insect infests stored grains and grain products, and reproduces rapidly. Hardiness and quick reproduction–traits much deplored in a pest–however, make the red flour beetle an ideal model organism for ecological, genetic, and reproductive behavior research.

Although theory states that in most organisms, a 1:1 sex ratio of adult males to females is optimal, variable sex ratios do exist in certain populations and species. The evolutionary consequences of such conditions have been extensively studied; for example, females benefit from a male-biased sex ratio if they can choose and mate with a high-quality male, or, if a female can mate with several males to ensure high genetic diversity in her brood. Alternatively, under such conditions, forced mating by desperate males could reduce a female's life and her reproductive success. Most of these studies, however, focus mainly on male behavior, and little is known about how female behavior, especially non-sexual competition amongst females, affects the impact of sex ratio on reproductive success.

"We decided to test how female-female interactions could affect reproductive success under different sex ratios using T. castaneum," says Deepa Agashe. "We set up three types of groups–male-biased groups, with one female and three males, female-biased groups with one male and three females, and unbiased groups, with three males and three females," she adds. The beetles were provided with an ample amount of flour, and females were periodically isolated from their groups for a day to lay eggs in isolation, after which, they were returned to their groups.

From these experiments, Agashe's team found that females in the male-biased groups consistently laid more eggs, and had more surviving offspring than females from either of the other two groups.

"The results we got were so stark and clear," states Imroze Khan, the lead author, from Agashe's group. "And then, when I was handling the beetles one day, I wondered if the pungent smell from the boxes that housed the beetles had any connection to the effects we were seeing in our experiments," he adds.

The 'pungent' odor Khan mentions is a characteristic smell associated with flour beetle infestations. As pheromones and other beetle-secreted chemicals accumulate, they 'condition' the flour, giving it a characteristic aroma. When Khan, teaming up with Arun Prakash, exposed freshly mated young female beetles to flour 'conditioned' by female-biased groups, he found that their egg-laying was reduced. However, this reduction in egg-laying did not occur when 'conditioned' flour from male-biased groups was used.

Female beetles seemed to be secreting something into the flour, that could suppress other females' reproduction.

Agashe's group hypothesized that the weapons of choice in this reproductive war were compounds called benzoquinones, which female beetle stink glands produced in fairly large amounts. However, the identities of the benzoquinones involved in reducing egg-laying were unknown. At this point, Agashe and Khan reached out to Radhika Venkatesan for help.

"Since my group specializes in identifying natural chemical compounds, we teamed up with Deepa's lab, and IDed methyl benzoquinone and ethyl benzoquinone as candidate compounds that could affect egg-laying," says Venkatesan.

Now, Agashe's group began planning experiments to test if the pure compounds could reduce egg-laying just like flour 'conditioned' by female-biased groups could. Here, however, the researchers ran into a problem.

"Although methyl benzoquinone is readily available commercially, ethyl benzoquinone is very unstable, and so cannot be bought. This is where our collaboration with Radhika was even more fortuitous; she synthesized ethyl benzoquinone for us in her lab," says Agashe.

When the experiments were finally performed, the results were most satisfying. Adding ethyl and methyl bezoquinone to stink gland extracts in increasing dosages increasingly suppress egg-laying in female beetles.

"Finding a chemical cause for a fundamental biological phenomenon is pretty rare, but we have done it with this work. Now, we're looking forward to addressing a whole new set of questions on how these chemicals affect the beetles physiologically" says Agashe.

###

About the work:

The work described in this article has been published in a paper titled "Female Density-Dependent Chemical Warfare Underlies Fitness Effects of Group Sex Ratio in Flour Beetles", in the journal, The American Naturalist.

About the authors:

At the time that this work was carried out, Imroze Khan, Arun Prakash, Swastika Issar, Mihir Umarani, Rohit Sasidharan, Jagadeesh N. Masagalli, Prakash Lama, Radhika Venkatesan, and Deepa Agashe were affiliated to the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore.

Currently, Imroze Khan is affiliated to Ashoka University, Haryana; Swastika Issar is affiliated to Cambridge University, UK; Mihir Umarani is affiliated to Stony Brook University, USA; Jagadeesh N. Masagalli is affiliated to Dongguk University-Seoul, Republic of Korea. All other authors remain affiliated to NCBS.

Media Contact

Deepa Agashe
[email protected]

http://www.ncbs.res.in

Original Source

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/suppl/10.1086/695806

Share25Tweet16Share4ShareSendShare
  • PAN protein domain

    Scientists discover cancer trigger that could spur targeted drug therapies

    77 shares
    Share 31 Tweet 19
  • COVID-19 fattens up our body’s cells to fuel its viral takeover

    103 shares
    Share 41 Tweet 26
  • Messenger RNA technology shows promise for developing infectious disease therapeutics

    66 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 17
  • New guidelines laid out to standardize swallowing fluoroscopy

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
  • Physicists work to shrink microchips with first one-dimensional helium model system

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
  • How bilingual brains work: Cross-language interplay and an integrated lexicon

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
ADVERTISEMENT

About us

We bring you the latest science news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Latest NEWS

COVID-19 fattens up our body’s cells to fuel its viral takeover

Scientists discover cancer trigger that could spur targeted drug therapies

Immune molecules from a llama could provide protection against a vast array of SARS-like viruses including COVID-19, researchers say

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 190 other subscribers

© 2022 Scienmag- Science Magazine: Latest Science News.

No Result
View All Result
  • HOME PAGE
  • BIOLOGY
  • CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS
  • MEDICINE
    • Cancer
    • Infectious Emerging Diseases
  • SPACE
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • CONTACT US

© 2022 Scienmag- Science Magazine: Latest Science News.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Posting....