Professor Joel Levine's team genetically tweaked fruit flies so that they didn't produce certain pheromones, they triggered a sexual tsunami.
They produced bugs so irresistible that normal male fruit flies attempted to mate with pheromone-free males and even females from a different species-generally a no-no in the fruit fly dating scene.
"This is important not only from the point of view of understanding social dynamics, but it's also fundamental biology, because these pheromones provide recognition cues that facilitate reproductive behaviour," says Levine, an assistant professor of biology. "Lacking these chemical signals (pheromones) eliminated barriers to mating. It turned out that males of other species were attracted to females who didn't have these signals, so that seemed to eliminate the species barrier."
Researches then treated females bred without the hydrocarbons with a female aphrodisiac, this restored the barrier of preventing sex between species.
It's weird that if you just switched on this in a species, you could change the entire way that animal lived their life. To read more go to, science daily.com
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