Dec.
13, 2012 — For over 25 years, Paul Sternberg has been studying worms --
how they develop, why they sleep, and, more recently, how they communicate.
Now, he has flipped the script a bit by taking a closer look at how predatory
fungi may be tapping into worm conversations to gain clues about their
whereabouts.
Nematodes,
Sternberg's primary worm interest, are found in nearly every corner of the
world and are one of the most abundant animals on the planet. Unsurprisingly,
they have natural enemies, including numerous types of carnivorous fungi that
build traps to catch their prey. Curious to see how nematophagous fungi might
sense that a meal is present without the sensory organs -- like eyes or noses
-- that most predators use, Sternberg and Yen-Ping Hsueh, a postdoctoral
scholar in biology at Caltech, started with a familiar tool: ascarosides. These
are the chemical cues that nematodes use to "talk" to one another.
"If
we think about it from an evolutionary perspective, whatever the worms are
making that can be sensed by the nematophagous fungi must be very important to
the worm -- otherwise, it's not worth the risk," explains Hsueh. "I
thought that ascarosides perfectly fit this hypothesis."
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