Moth, how do you find your mate?

By:yoko

source: High Lander, UCR: Male moths use ration-based attraction through pheromones (4/23/2013)

Couple of weeks ago,  I went to the UCR’s main campus and I found the newspaper which name is HIGHLANDER. It looked good. Although I brought one of it to my home, I forgot about it for weeks. For this blogging, I was thinking what to read and I remembered this news paper. I found an article of moth. A research explains how male moths attract female moths.

 

UCR’s former student, Teun Dekker, and faculty, Boyce Chair Ring Carde, is member of this international research. It is known how female moths attract male moths, Female moths have own pheromones ratio unique to their species so only the same species of male moths are attracted. However there are many cases of hybrids. Then how do they find their partner? In conclusion, male moths lose the ability to measure the pheromone ratio as they fly upwind along the pheromone plume. They changed their behavior using the wind. The answer was much simpler than what the researchers thought. They thought that hybrid male moths have two kinds of receptors for the ratio and decide what the correct ration is from comparing to responses. They didn’t think that the answer will be so simple that could be explained by physiological basis. This research may be applied to a mosquito and human’s sense of odors. Carde says that the researchers couldn’t find this fact for a long time because they never thought to change the odor blend while the animal is in the process of responding.

I think it’s interesting that sometimes the answer which many people tried to find is easily explained by simple reason. I expect that they find why mosquitoes bite human and prevent them from doing it. I could find a many kinds of articles in this newspaper. This is placed in many places so please try it if you're interested in.