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Did you know that the fruit fly can taste food with its legs? Read on to find out…
The sense of taste is one of the most important senses when it comes to accepting food (Ebbs & Amrein, 2007). For humans, even if a food product is the most nutritious but has a bad taste they may forget all the good things the product has to offer and may avoid it altogether simply because it has a bad taste. The importance of taste cannot be stressed enough as food choice decisions cannot be made without considering taste.
This phenomenon is not peculiar to only humans. Animals including insects also use taste to determine if food is safe to eat. A bad taste generally indicates a substance is potentially harmful while a good taste indicates digestible food. Insects apply taste in the selection of food with the aid of their proboscis. The story is no different for the fruit fly, a bugging and somewhat pesky creature that seems to terrorize us in our kitchens.
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The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is a species of fly in the family Drosophilae. They are also known as the vinegar fly. These insects are attracted to ripened or fermenting fruits and vegetables. They are found in homes, restaurants, supermarkets and wherever there is rotting and fermenting food.
The 1/8-inch-long adult has a yellowish-brown front and a black rear. We could go on and on about the entomology of the insect but our focus today is on its numerous taste organs. The taste organs are spread throughout the body of the fruit fly. Though there are many taste organs, the proboscis is the main taste organ. Like humans, fruit flies can detect a wide range of taste including the 5 basic tastes sweet, bitter, sour, umami and salt.
In humans, taste perception is encoded by specialized cells in the taste buds located on the tongue. The functional and molecular differences in the taste receptors allow the recognitions of different tastes. The fruit fly uses its taste neurons to detect chemicals (tastants) that signal whether a food is palatable or harmful. According to a research by the University of California, it is still unclear how each individual neurons in each taste organ act to control feeding.
Since the taste organs of the fruit fly are spread out, it possesses an advantage in tasting compared to other organisms. This is because it can taste food irrespective of the part of the body in touch with the food. If the fly tastes sweet food with its feet or any part of the body, it turns and eats it with the proboscis. If it tastes with the proboscis, it eats it immediately since the proboscis is the main tasting and feeding organ.
There may be similarities and differences in the taste process of fruit flies and humans but it is worth knowing that both humans and fruit flies can detect the 5 basic tastes and make food choices based on the taste of foods.
REFERENCES
Ebbs, M.L., Amrein, H. Taste and pheromone perception in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster . Pflugers Arch - Eur J Physiol 454, 735–747 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00424-007-0246-y
University of California - Riverside. (2021, July 27). Fruit fly offers lessons in good taste: Study shows food choice decisions require taste input. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 18, 2021 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210727171549.htm