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runearcana · 3 years

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My headcanon is that Trolls are evolved from axoloytls, and so that will be part of my AUs lore too. Look at Feferi.. she looks like an axoloytl. Her skin is a pink hue, her ears are similar to what axoloytls have for ears or whatever, shes amphibious like the axoloytls are.

To be more specific I see them as axoloytl-moth hybrids.

Their horns are antennas, their mother is a grub.

Their horns are sensitive similarly to antenna on bugs.

The thing about trolls is that their mother grub is supposedly a female/mother/egg layer.

The trolls genetic material might be something a lot like sperm, but it gets mixed together somehow to cause fertilization of the eggs.

This kind of BUGS me [hah] but I think all trolls except for the mother grubs have male genitalia and provide sperm for her, and that it being a slurry is more about maximum randomization to promote new characteristics to their species as much as possible. This is why trolls are so individualistic.

This is a moth dick when closed. :o

This is a moth dick when opened.

Thats the equipment my trolls have.

So female trolls could be futas [Futanari] or just identify as female.

My trolls pupate out of their wiggler stage at 3 years in human years.

My AU trolls have retractible penises so they can represent a male or female gender. The clawed tips only open when they reach orgasm, in order to secrete their sperm.

Alternatively, trolls are a hermaphrodite species which is why they tend to be pansexual. Maybe they can *choose* whether their genitals work/look like a penis or vagina, but still produce sperm either way.

or maybe the mother grub is a surrogate host who incubates the eggs until theyre ready to hatch.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/mspaintadventures/images/b/b9/Kanaya_Lusus.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/180?cb=20120523173458

From the homestuck wiki: In a discussion about reproduction, Aranea stated that trolls reproduce bisexually while humans reproduce heterosexually,

and

In a conversation Kanaya has with Jade, it is shown that trolls do have a concept of hermaphroditism, but it applies to livestock and not trolls themselves

monoecious is a term for a bisexual species; ie, hermaphradites

Humans can ONLY reproduce with a male and female.

A individual troll of the two genders can reproduce with a male OR female gendered troll.

The mother grub is a surrogate mother and trolls have male and female genetalia.

They lack reproductive organs but produce both types of genetic material, eggs and sperm.

ORRR

Kanaya is saying they are all male biologically except mother grubs.

An attempt to compromise these two very conflicting arguments:

this means that mother grubs are always females.

but the males of their species are more complex because they can change their gender to male or female.

Its not asexual.

Sequential hermaphroditism is the name for this ability to become male or female. It has hermaphrodite in its name, so Kanaya may disagree, and shes supposed to be an expert on troll biology.

Another way of looking at it is, we can rule out them being asexual, because they need the matriorb to survive as a species, as it hatches a mothergrub. This is universally agreed upon in troll society. If they could recreate asexually, the matriorb wouldnt have mattered.

This means there are at least two sexes.

Hermaphrodite vs all trolls except the mother grub are males

We dont know if one, both, or neither of these are accurate, so beyond trolls having at least two genders, we have no absolute proof [that I have found], so its all speculation.

Anyways, Im going with all female trolls are transgender except mother grubs grubs.

Maybe one of the things about trolls having breasts is that because the mother grub looks nothing like the drones and wouldnt be sexually enticing, they needed to create female roles in their society that WOULD be enticing? and the breasts kind of mark a character as symbolically female, even though they are still male biologically. So trolls still explore gender roles because they need to to be able to reproduce? but I dunno, thered be plenty of gay males, presumably, and it would achieve the same thing.

or maybe because the mother grub cant be socialized and would more than likely be less intelligent, maybe they need to explore gender roles so that they have nurturers and other such female roles.

Fushias are always symbolically female to represent the mother grub.

Jades are [almost?] always symbolically female so they can represent more nurturing qualities?

So troll gender is about gender ROLES, while their sexual organs are biologically male for all but the mother grubs.

Theyre all biologically gay unless they find mother grubs or aliens hot.

but they may have gender-based preferences for their mates.

but anyway, all this stuff is normal to them, so THEY dont question it, but we humans are mind boggled by the implications, or maybe thats just me.

#troll sexuality #troll reproduction

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bubblegumdicc · 7 years

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I’ve recently been thinking how exactly periods would work for my monsters. see, I hc it as they reproduce with their souls, as most do, which means two dmab or two dfab can produce offspring together, which for two dmab would mean that after soulbonding/soulsex, if they were to get pregnant, their genitalia would slowly shift before the birth to be a puss, so ya know, they can give birth, and of course slowly shift back after the pregnancy. (This also leaves possibility for some monsters bodies not shifting like they should, causing complications and possibly surgery needed) ((rest under read more since it got much longer than I intended..))

Skeleton monsters however, (depending on how much of a hybrid/mixed they are and magic levels) typically can shift their genitalia whenever they want, so wouldn’t have quite as slow of a shift as other types of monsters and during pregnancy, they might not be able to form a dick at all (I’m not completely sure on this, as it could easily be possible for them to form a dick above the puss, which sounds more plausible tbh, but it’d take extra energy for them to do so)

Obviously in humans, only dfab have periods, but that’s bcuz they have a uterus for pregnancy, so if monsters reproduce by soul and they all have the ability to become pregnant despite their sex, that leaves the question of how their bodies work with that. Normally the uterus bleeds to shed and clean to prepare for a baby and all that. Since all monsters can become pregnant despite sex, that either means they all have some form of uterus/ect(which would mean they’re all intersex/hermaphrodite technically) OR the uterus only forms in dmab’s after soul bonding when they get preg, which I’m leaning more towards.

That option means dmab monsters would not experience a period, but can still become pregnant, which im simply not completely content with bcuz I want them to bleed.

this also brings up the existence of what heats are for, since in the animal world, they go into heat for breeding purposes. after putting thought into all this, periods and heats would technically be the same thing. You bleed and breed.

Theres also subcategories tho, like sub heat and domheats, sub being where they want to be impregnated. So this could occur randomly, some have more of one than the other ect ect. Heats also vary from monster to monster, some might have heats every Month, some only once every 2 years or something.

Perhaps dmab would then only have a period type thing if they go into a sub heat, which would make sense I think and so far is what I’m thinking I’ll go with.

Honestly this is all just my random theorizing and deep thought into fictional monster anatomy, which all started bcuz I’m a filthy fucker and wanted blood and now I’m thinking really deep into their anatomy and the fact any sex can become pregnant and I’m writing all this out to help myself think and make a desicion on whether or not heats and periods are one in the same or not, and if not, that would bring a whole dif set of questions as to why they have two separate similar things when the soul heat is the only one necessary for reproduction.

how I thought of it originally, the soul would get super drippy when in heat, and other parts, like their crotch of course, only gets drippy as a side effect of the horniness, since sex isn’t actually necessary for reproduction with monsters. And when it comes down to it, the simplest and I guess most plausible option is that they don’t have periods at all, since its all based on the soul for reproduction. But again, I want the option for any to bleed bcuz I just fuckin do that’s why.

So I’m THINKING maybe it’s random and sometimes their heats come with blood and sometimes they don’t, so they’re technically the same, just dif sub types of heat I suppose. Maybe. also im optionally thinking that the soul may bleed as well, since its the main thing, but even if its just dripping juices, i realize theyd prob need some kind of soul-pad thing so they dont leek all over their shirts. THAT HOWEVER might only be in skeleton speices, other species may just drip into their body and maybe expel the excess by pissing? whereas the skeletons have to wear something on their chest bcuz itll leak through their ectoflesh. again, not completely sure what ill go with, but when it all comes down to it, im sticking to my guns when i was asked before if they have periods, and yes they all do.

Also tacking this on as a side thought, skeleton monsters technically have no defined sex from birth, I figure they’re MAYBE born with a cloaca type thing?(essentially just a puss really, since my hc is none of them shit) tho I think dif babies come out differently, it also depends on how much of a hybrid they are, puppet for instance is only half skeleton and was born with a dick, so technically they’d be dmab. I figure most skeletons, especially the less mixed/hybrid ones, simply choose genders for their babies or leave it ambiguous until the child gets older and chooses for themself. (Though some even with a defined sex at birth child would still go with ambiguous, it’s more of choice on how to raise them.)

For further example, ph was born without an ectobody altogether, since theyre a mostly pure skeleton monster. The only reason I consider them intersex is bcuz when they do form an ectobody, what ‘comfortably’ forms for them is a mix of both parts, but the basis of being a mostly pure species of skeleton is there’s no defined sex whatsoever, so identifying as intersex would be by choice for ph.

ANYWAYS THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG AND I APPLAUD ANYONE WHO TOOK THE TIME TO READ THIS and if u have input or ideas on it man, I’d love to hear em. I’m thinking too deep about this monster shit now. also im gonna end this by saying again, this is all just my personal headcanon stuff and of course other ppl don’t abide by it unless they choose to or already hc something similar ect ect. also also, i want to tack on that i like the idea twigs had about the difference between soulsex and soulbonding, soulsex being where you may or may not get pregnant, and soulbonding being a guaranteed pregnancy. (tho perhaps only mostly guaranteed/or just a higher chance of pregnancy for my hc, still unsure) u can check my headcanon tag for other related things, tho i think the only other thing in that tag rn is this which goes more into how skeletons ectoflesh works

#monster anatomy #skeleton anatomy #headcanon #hopefully this is all in order #it was a lot of random thought i wrote down and tried to organize so it flowed #geddit #flowed?#lmao #ok ok that was a bad pun sorry #theyspeak

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lodelss · 5 years

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Laura Barcella | Longreads | February 2019 | 13 minutes (3,517 words)

The 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade just occurred on January 22 — but the days of relatively uncomplicated American abortion access are, most likely, numbered. In fact, author Robin Marty believes it’s not a matter of if Roe will be overturned, it’s a matter of when.

For more than ten years, the Minneapolis-based freelance reporter and author of the new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America has been diligently chronicling the twists and turns of both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, Marty — like many other pro-choice Americans — has been waiting for the proverbial pro-life shoe to drop. Losing Kennedy, the swing voter on a number of major abortion rulings, and gaining Brett Kavanaugh — a long-time pro-life ally — seems to all but ensure the end of Roe, as well as the downfall of abortion being considered a constitutional right.

Indeed, several weeks after Marty and I spoke in late January, Kavanaugh voted with a minority of Justices to overturn recent Court precedent in favor of a law that sought to impose a new form of undue burden on abortion-seekers in Louisiana. The Cut called Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion something verging on gaslighting. In it, he postulates that perhaps the undue burden — abortion providers being required to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals — could simply be met, when of course providers have already been trying to gain admitting privileges for years. The Court ultimately blocked the implementation of the law, but only because the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals. The margin of safety has grown vanishingly thin.

Let’s consider what that means. If Roe were overturned, it wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for a pregnant person to obtain an abortion, but it would potentially make an already challenging process even more daunting. As it stands, obtaining an abortion is already far from affordable or convenient for many women, even in blue states with a plethora of clinics. Despite Roe’s current status, and despite the fact that statistically, most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, abortion care is still often portrayed as a privilege instead of a right — or as a miserable “worst-case” scenario rather than a straightforward medical procedure.

Marty’s new book (available now from Seven Stories Press) lays out various scenarios for exactly what a Roe-less future might look like. More importantly, it explains exactly how we should prepare for this reality. As Marty writes in Handbook, “While Roe and the cases that preceded it made birth control and abortion legal, they did nothing to curtail the coercive power our government wields over the bodies of those who can give birth.”

For the liberal naysayers who can’t fathom America sinking quite so far into Handmaid-land, Marty reminds readers that not only have anti-choice laws and restrictions been ramping up in recent years, but the pro-life contingent has been emboldened under Trump’s presidency in frightening new ways. In the following interview, Marty further explains the possible dangers of what lies ahead, and how we can start protecting ourselves now.

Can you tell me a little bit about how the book came about? It traces back to a Twitter thread, is that right?

Right. Anthony Kennedy announced that he would be retiring. As soon as that happened, my first thought was, ‘Okay, this is basically the end of Roe.’ And even if this isn’t exactly the end of Roe, it’s enough of a push and enough of a change that all the people who had been quiet before and hadn’t seen this as a real threat, finally understand that it’s a turning point.

Part of the reason I started the Twitter thread was because the first two things that I saw people saying as soon as Kennedy announced his retirement were, A) ‘I’m going to donate to Planned Parenthood,’ and B) ‘I’m going to stockpile emergency contraception.’ And my first thought was okay, donating to Planned Parenthood is always good, but there are so many clinics in states that only have one clinic that are not run by Planned Parenthood, and that doesn’t help them. And getting emergency contraception for yourself is always good, but the idea of stockpiling can be done in such a way that it actually harms access.

I talked to a number of people who are very high in the pro-life movement. Many of them assured me that Kavanaugh will be the vote, and that Roe will be overturned as soon as they can get a case up there.

My thought was ‘Here are all these things that you can do that would be better actions than what people are describing.’ And so it turned into…a 30-tweet thread of [suggestions for] places you can donate to and actions you can take instead; groups that you should be working with on the ground.

As I was doing this, I was getting a lot of really good responses. One of them was from … a woman book agent, who said, ‘I think there’s actually a book there; can you write a proposal and I will see what I can do?’

Within about a month, I had a book deal with the understanding that I had to write a book in three months, because they wanted it out before the anniversary of Roe.

I was going to ask you about the timeline because I knew it must have been tight. Was that stressful?

Yeah, it was definitely a challenge. Especially because it was summer, so I had children at home. My first book, Crow After Roe, was sort of … I accepted a proposal with my co-author and we didn’t really expect the first publisher that we sent it to, to say ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ But they did, and then they said, ‘We’re going to move a book aside so we can run this right away. Can you have it done for us in three months?’

There seems to be something about three months! It’s always three months for me.

But I wrote this book in about eight weeks.

That sounds stressful.

I would like to say I wrote a lot, but most of what I did [for the handbook] was compiling all of the different information that was already out there. And I did that for two reasons — one was so that it was in one accessible place so it’s easy to get to, and the other … was because people don’t always know where to look for this information. We’ve already seen with the Trump administration how information disappears. Health and Human Services re-wrote some of their rules, they disappeared trans language from a lot of things. Nothing on the internet is completely safe, [whether] because of censorship or anti-abortion activists who decide that they want to do some attacks online to try and bring down websites; there’s always the [chance] that you might not be able to get to information when you need it.

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How did you get involved in covering abortion care and abortion access as one of your primary beats?

That evolved out of being a progressive blogger. I started anonymously blogging in 2004 while I was working for an investment banking firm. I ended up working for a progressive news site that was setting up state-based news sites. I got more aware of the abortion issue, especially what was going on in [various] states.

In 2009, I ended up writing specifically for a reproductive health website. They picked me up after I was laid off, right after the Affordable Care Act debate and … trying to get all abortion coverage removed from the insurance plans. I had just had a miscarriage, and I had to go into a hospital for a DNC in order to have everything removed. I had this very in-your-face ‘what if’ moment of [wondering], ‘Would that be something my insurance will cover under the new plan?’ Because it was coded in the hospital bills as abortion.

After that I was working for RH Reality Check, as it was called back then (now it’s Rewire News), and I spent a few years tracking all of these bills as they were popping up through the states, and it grew from there.

Can you walk me through the scenarios that you see as the most likely and least likely when it comes to legal abortion access?

If you had asked me a week ago [we had this conversation in late January -LB], I would have said the most likely thing that was going to happen would be that the Supreme Court would keep Roe intact; that it would not overturn the verdict. The court would allow states to pass whatever bills they wanted to pass, as long as they did not explicitly completely ban the procedure.

Can you explain that a bit more?

What I [believed would] happen was that you would have a state like Mississippi, which only has one abortion clinic, and it would finally be allowed to enact rules that would close that one clinic. But because it didn’t actually ban abortion outright in the state, and the state would still [technically] allow abortion, that it would still be considered constitutional.

But now I actually believe that Roe will be overturned completely — and that states will be allowed to make it completely illegal.

Why do you believe that now?

I was at the March for Life [recently], and I talked to a number of people who are very high in the pro-life movement. Many of them assured me that Kavanaugh will be the vote, and that Roe will be overturned as soon as they can get a case up there.

I believe that Roe will be overturned, that we’ll have at least 10 to 15 states that will not have any abortion [access] at all. There will be a number of states that might go completely without abortion or otherwise will pass laws that will make it extraordinarily difficult to get an abortion at all, and then there will be about 10 to 15 states that will have abortion access and will probably expand it.

The problem with this scenario is that all the states that are going to either ban, or are going to make abortion nearly impossible to get, are all in the same place. They’re in the Midwest, and the entirety of the Southeast, except for maybe Florida, will be without any sort of legal abortion. That’s scary and alarming, and something that we have to plan for.

It sounds horrible to say ‘Plan for an abortion now,’ but the reality is, if you are capable of getting pregnant, [planning] is something that you should do.

How do we plan for that? What do you suggest people start doing now?

The first thing that I tell everybody is that the best thing to do is plan for what will happen if Roe is overturned and abortion is illegal. What a person can do is figure out what is going on in their state first — will their state be one that will make abortion illegal or will they have some sort of access? Which is going to be the closest state to you that will have abortion access?

It sounds horrible to say ‘Plan for an abortion now,’ but the reality is, if you are capable of getting pregnant, [planning] is something that you should do. We’re looking at huge travel that will have to happen, and trying to get through waiting periods in some of the states that remain. The clinics that are going to be left are going to be overbooked, and abortion is not going to be covered by insurance. It will be extremely expensive, so if you plan for that and don’t need it, that’s fantastic. But if you suddenly find yourself with an unexpected pregnancy that you don’t want to carry to term, trying to figure all of that out at the last minute is going to be extraordinarily daunting.

People plan for retirement; people plan for all sorts of things in their life. You should also plan for an abortion.

I know there’s no way to explicitly predict this, but what sort of timeline do you think this might happen in?

I would say that Roe will probably be overturned … after the 2020 election. It would be that soon. We have a number of cases already in the federal court system that have circuit splits [in which two federal courts don’t agree about whether similar laws are constitutional]. Any one of those can be taken up to the Supreme Court for them to make a final ruling, and through that can overturn Roe.

Also, something that people don’t understand is that the courts can technically take any case that’s about abortion and use that to overturn Roe. So for instance, the Indiana Down Syndrome ban. Basically every time the court meets again to see if they’re going to take up a case, it could be the one that would overturn Roe, if they chose to use it that way.

But … I don’t see the courts doing it before 2020 just because of election impact. I hate to say it, but our Supreme Court has become so partisan at this point that I see them taking that as a consideration.

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Which state restrictions are you monitoring the most closely right now?

Depending on scenario, heartbeat bans are really alarming because they make it almost impossible to get an abortion before it’s too late to get an abortion. But for the most part, courts have been saying that [those are] unconstitutional.

One of the [other] things really alarming me right now is the idea of abortion restrictions on top of abortion restrictions, especially when it comes to states that are expanding their waiting periods. There’s two different ways that waiting periods work. In some states, waiting periods start from the point at which you call a clinic, and so they’ll give you information on the phone and you don’t have to make two trips into the clinic. But a lot of states are now having them in a way that you have to come in to the clinic, get the information, then walk away, come back and have your next appointment anywhere from 24 to 72 hours afterwards.

When you take a state that has a waiting period of 72 hours or more, has only one clinic, and then the clinic only performs [abortions] up to 12 weeks, then you have basically [created] a situation where a person is going to spend at least a week just going back and forth, trying to get an abortion knowing that there’s a cutoff, plus knowing that there’s an immense wait to get into that clinic to start with.

[This is how] they’re really strangling the system altogether. None of these things on their own necessarily look unreasonable, but stacked on top of each other, they’ve made abortion almost impossible to get.

You recently attended the March for Life. Did you notice a bigger turnout, or more fervency among the pro-life faction there?

Yes, yes, yes. I’ve been to the March for Life four times now. At the march I went to before the 2016 election, abortion opponents thought they had lost. They believed that Hillary Clinton was going to be elected. They believed they were losing the entirety of the Supreme Court, so it was a very dejected feeling there, but [there was] also a sense of ‘what can we do in order to make tiny gains around the edges?’

Being at the march over the last two years, it has changed so dramatically. Their people are in the administration, they’re in the HHS, their elected leaders are everywhere. They have so much right now, and they know that. They feel that Roe is on the rocks, that they are about to have that win.

Also, the March for Life has become increasingly political ever since President Trump was elected. There’s signs saying “Make Babies Great Again” and, like the Covington students, everyone’s wearing MAGA hats. It’s become so intertwined with politics, and especially with the Republican party, that it has in many ways turned into a rally for social conservatives and for the religious right.

If abortion is made illegal again … people are, frankly, unlikely to die … Our problem now is that abortion … done outside the legal system is going to get you thrown in jail.

You touched on third-trimester abortion a little bit in the book, which is already not readily accessible throughout the country. What will happen to that if Roe is overturned?

We just had New York pass the Reproductive Health Act, which basically removed all abortion from the criminal code, which means that New York providers can now offer third-trimester abortions in cases where there is a significant medical need for it. So if a person is having mental health issues, if a person has a fetus with an anomaly that they can’t or don’t want to carry to term, third-trimester abortion has been opened up as long as there is a valid medical reason for it. And that’s not something that was happening in New York before. Before, we had a clinic in Colorado that would do it, and a clinic in Maryland, and a clinic in New Mexico.

There’s a section of your handbook about privacy concerns. Why was that important for you to include?

One of the things that we’re already seeing when people induce their own abortions or have bad pregnancy outcomes that make the hospitals or the authorities suspect that they induced their own abortions, is that when they’re investigated their computers get seized. Their phones get looked at. One of the things that happened to Purvi Patel, who was arrested for feticide and homicide in Indiana, was that they looked at her text messages and saw that she said she had taken something. That was what they used to prosecute her.

If a person’s going to work outside of the legal clinic system in order to end a pregnancy…we just have to be aware of what sort of information could get out there, especially when a person might be going outside of the legal clinic system, and anybody else who has talked to them could be seen as an accessory in either having helped them obtain medication or [other] ways.

Can you talk a little bit more about self-managed abortion? Were there legal challenges to publishing that particular chapter of your book?

Not specifically, although I did have it vetted by a lawyer. One of the things that’s very interesting about the publisher that I ended up with, and probably one of the reasons that the book exists at all, is that Seven Stories Press actually published a book called A Woman’s Book of Choices by Carol Downer. One of the things she did was explain how to do menstrual extraction. That was considered mind-blowing at the time, that there was a publisher that would actually give instructions on how to make this and do this.

So the publisher was really good about wanting to include all of this information, that this is information that needs to be public. And honestly, all of this information is online; it’s available everywhere, it’s just not compiled in one space. I’m not encouraging anybody to do this, and I think that the best way is always going to be going through the legal system. It’s just, if people are going to do it, they need to have information on how to do it safely.

Do you think we’ll see an uptick in DIY abortions? Is there already an uptick?

My understanding is that there probably is. The fact that we can’t verify that or actually prove that in any way, shape, or form is good because that means that people are doing it the right way, protecting their privacy and making sure that their caches are not being found. When they do speak to people at hospitals, making sure that it’s understood that this is a miscarriage and that’s all the information that a person needs to give.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you keep hearing or seeing regarding abortion access lately?

I see a lot of people saying that they still don’t believe that Roe is going to be overturned. I also see people — on our side as well — [repeat] the idea that people [will die] if abortion is made illegal again.

When we go into a post-Roe landscape, people are, frankly, unlikely to die if they get illegal abortions. Because we can get medications online, and these medications have been proven to be very safe. If there is a rare complication, it can be taken care of at a hospital, if necessary.

Our problem now is that abortion … done outside the legal system is going to get you thrown in jail.

We need to, as a movement, make sure that people understand that doing your own self-induced abortion is not medically any more dangerous than a [medically supervised] abortion would be. The only difference is that because this is not legal, people are afraid to report when something goes wrong. And in some cases it’s not even anything going wrong, it’s just too many people don’t know exactly what the process is like, so they think something is going wrong.

We have to make sure that everybody understands what a self-managed abortion looks like; what’s normal, what’s not normal, what will get them in trouble, what will not get them in trouble, what to say to a hospital, what not to say to a hospital.

People need to be aware of all of that because when we go into a post-Roe future … we aren’t generally going to see [people] bleeding out and dying in their homes, but we could see [people] going in for help because they think something’s wrong, and ending up in jail instead.

* * *

Laura Barcella is an NYC-based journalist and author.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

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caredogstips · 7 years

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In accolade of the humble fruit fly

Drosophila, the hard-working fruit fly widely used in genetics investigate, is a lot more like us than we might care to think. Time we got to know the little pest

In a series of areas in the Fly Facility of the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University, around 5m return wings are kept in test tube at any given point in time. Theyre stored at different temperatures to adjudicate running durations of life cycle at 25 C, its about 10 dates; at jug temperatures as long as five weeks.

Out in the wild, “they dont have” pest quite so likable to human needs as the humble pomace fly. It may have spent the summer feasting on the contents of your return container, but not until your assembled plums and peaches were starting to canker. But while gastronomic predisposition are typical to be applauded in a run, the drosophila, to present it its official title, has more going for it than good table manners.

For the past century, it has also acted the crucial serve of a science and medical search tool. Today, its often the first stop in research into a wide range of human illnesses, including Alzheimers disease, Huntingtons disease, spastic paraplegia, cancer and obesity. By compared to mice and dogs, let alone apes and humans, its massively inexpensive and easy-going working in cooperation with and there is little chance of sucking dissent from even the most radical anti-vivisectionist.

In many respects its position as a crucial search tool is a historical accident. Between 1910 and 1915, the pioneering American geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan worked on Drosophila melanogaster in his renowned Fly Room at Columbia University and been demonstrated that genes provide the basis for chromosomal inheritance, for which he won a Nobel prize winner. It was a critical breakthrough, but there was no particular reason that it had to be made via the fruit fly. Yet ever since then, the tiny drosophila has been at the vanguard of genetic research. In the 1920 s, another American geneticist, Hermann J Muller, has showed that radioactivity leads to genetic mutation in fruit wings. The reason were careful about exposure to x-rays is no tiny portion due to Mullers work.

But some of the mutations that Muller grew, such as pilots with legs coming out of their premiers, subsequently played into the postwar period of atomic paranoia, acquainted George Langelaans short story The Fly, which was constructed into a film first in the 50 s and then remade by David Cronenberg in the 1980 s.

Jeff Goldblum mid-mutation in David Cronenbergs 1986 cinema The Fly. Image: Sportsphoto Ltd/ Allstar

In the tale and the films, research scientists mutates into a wing, an idea thats shaking precise since we are experience ourselves as being so altogether differences between moves, with their strange the organizations and massive, honeycombed leaders and plainly creepy practices. This deep-seated nervousnes about runs has led to some famed misunderstands of biology. The most appalling speciman was in 2008, when Sarah Palin, extending for vice-president in the US presidential elections, told an audience that their money was going to is planned that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Concepts like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Despite Palins clueless doubts, one of the reasons that operates have become important to much genetic and medical investigate in its relationship with humans is that they tolerate a impressive genetic similarity to us. The sci-fi fear of a flys otherness may well be based, somewhere direction down, on its unsettling closeness to us.

It was Michael Ashburner, the godfather of fruit fly research at Cambridge, who first established that of the genes that in their mutant anatomy campaign diseases in humen cystic fibrosis being one example around 75% have very similar equivalents in return hovers. When Ashburner started out in the 1970 s, runs were maintained in milk bottles in a temporary laboratory on the outskirts of Cambridge. As an expression of the results of his foundational act, which includes his classic book Won For All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced , Cambridge has become arguably the worlds passing centre of fruit fly research.

Its Fly Facility is run by one of Ashburners former PhD students, Simon Collier, who showed me around the labs and fly storage of the facility. Hes been working with fruit operates for 25 years and in that time hes come to know and realize many of their obscured to most human observers characteristics.

If you take a tube of runs and left open here you notice that they have practices, he alleges. The males courtroom the females. They follow the females and put one wing out and it vibrates. Theres a person in Leicester whos experimented this and what theyre doing is producing a kind of love song.

Apparently, the females are not looking for a long-term affair and, certainly, theyre likely in their short life span to have multiple spouses. The question with this for geneticists is that they store semen so paternity is a disputed issue. To counter the embarrassment of this brazen immorality, geneticists tend to work with innocent females.

How can they tell? I ask.

The look in their seeing, Collier says drily.

A colourised SEM micrograph, amplified 70 epoches. of the head of a fruit fly, evidencing compound seeing. Photograph: Tom Hartman/ Getty Images

He shows me a magnification of a onu of fruit operates that have been knocked out by carbon dioxide. Theyre still blinking but essentially stationary. He points out the differences between males( a bit smaller) and females and shows that young wings virgins if you like are pale and unpigmented.

He explains that for study determinations special chromosomes have been developed that enable geneticists to draw exactly what genes have been inherited. With mouse, for example, its necessary to check gene by gene whats been inherited, which moves genetic study much more time-consuming and costly.

Because the fruit flys life cycle is so short and they procreate so fast( sexually maturity is reached within eight epoches of incubating ), drosophila are ideal subjects for its further consideration of inherited traits, including genetic aberrations, over many generations.

Still, to the amateur, even one slightly more versed in the exigencies of scientific research than Sarah Palin, theres something intensely counterintuitive about doing genetic research on wings. For one thing, theyre so small. Doesnt that make it a whole lot trickier?

Collier shakes his head. Its fairly simple if you want to look at the fruit flys genome. You exactly place them in a tube and squish them up and do some simple DNA extraction. Whats more complex is becoming the other route implanting genetic substance into them.

He takes me to a special lab where this procedure is carried out. They take the tent-fly larvae and strip the eggs off their eggshells by putting them in bleach. Then with a long and highly fine needle, the relevant genetic material is introduced into the posterior of the eggs where the germline cells are located.

Drosophila melanogaster gaze quality variants, picturing grey and cherry-red. The grey seeing gene is sex-linked. Picture: Alamy

Given that an egg is about 0.5 mm in length( about the dimensions of the a particle of sand ), and the DNA administered into it is about the capacity of a millionth of a drop of ocean, you can see how delicate an operation it is. It takes about six months to master the instant motor skills necessary to do the job.

Usually half the embryos will survive that procedure, enunciates Collier. And we are in a position reproduction from them and examine them.

But study what exactly? And to what end?

Collier innovates me to two colleagues who are active in fruit fly research, a reader in genetics announced Cahir OKane and Damian Crowther, a director of neuroscience the investigations and change at the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, who still holds links to the Fly Facility.

We go out to lunch and talk fruit operates. I expect Crowther first of all why “hed left” academic study to go into industry.

The story I tell, he alleges, is pals, and perhaps even adversaries, would ever insert me as, This is Damian, hes the tent-fly guy. In my occasion, Ive been a registrar in neurology and a research scientist in many areas I didnt conclude fly person certainly summarized me up.

OKane resembled the detail and both men agree that fly investigate has not made them either health professionals or social acknowledgment they speculate their work warrants.

What seems to matter most, to its implementation of professional appreciation at the least, is what is known as rendition, that is, passing the findings of fly research into productive contributions to medical applications for humen. There is little doubt that hovers study does contribute, in a wider appreciation of biological understanding of how all organisms piece, but also in specific examples of human illnes. However, its not easy to become direct links.

Its problematic, for obvious grounds, to lead from run tests to human experiments; there often needs to be a whole scope of happening stagecoaches in which other scientists take over and, unavoidably, take the spotlight and accreditation.

I cant tell you that theres a drug that Ive tested on return flies[ with an artificially created version of Alzheimers disease] thats benefited the fruit fly thats then gone on to benefit the human, articulates Crowther.

But, he excuses, Alzheimers commits the overproduction of proteins that species plaque in the brain that destroys neurons. So you can oblige frameworks of runs that raise these proteins, get their own plaque and succumb, he shows, and you are able to measure various ways of preventing the plaque formations.

Fruit wings dont naturally develop Alzheimers, although they have all the genetics of the Alzheimers pathway in their brain.

You have to give them human equivalent genes and push it really hard to get them to have Alzheimers in three weeks, shows Crowther.

Life hertz stages of the pomace fly, Drosophila sp, presenting larva, pupa, adult male( dark abdomen) and adult female. Image: Ed Reschke/ Getty Images

Instead of thinking of pilot research as a direct route to medical breakthroughs, its better to see it, Crowther quarrels, as a style of doing quick and dirty research. He believes that because its so cheap, it should be used in a multiplicity of ways that might spot the direction to most productive routes of research. And whenever there is drugs that have already been measured on humans and have passed safety requirements but have failed in their efficacy with the targeted disorder, they could be retargeted by first testing them on flies.

The contemplating around really bad maladies like engine neurone malady, Huntingtons disease, is if you can get anything to work in a cell culture replicated in an animal, thats the beginning as long as its safe of promptly get it to patients, remarks Crowther.

OKane is especially suspicious of overblown claims for translation. For him, the allure of the fruit fly is that it is a organism that rewards analyse in a larger context.

Im interested in it because I think its a great arrangement for finding out how living things in general can work. I conceive by understanding the principles of how tent-flies labour you are able to make better prophecies for humans. The better you understand how “were working” the most rational you can be about trying to pattern rehabilitations; I imagine even without directing your work towards therapy, you are able to speculate more intelligently about cares five or 10 years down the line.

It has been said , not least by Collier, that more know anything about the biology of the drosophila than any other animal on Earth. For speciman, we know that fruit moves have a kind of built-in compass in their mentalities that allows a sense of direction. As all animals need to know how they move, its not unreasonable to assume that its a way of universal computation.

Another study to demonstrate that male fruit moves that are rejected by a female teammate are more inclined to drown their anguishes in food spiked with alcohol than male fruit tent-flies that have succeeded in copulated. Again, a mentality chemical that governs the wings stomach and is predictive of their thirst for alcohol has an equivalent that has been linked to alcohol uptake in humans.

In another consider, this time at Oxford, it was found that fruit operates are capable of what are liable to be worded intelligent deliberation. Rather than doing solely impulsive decisions, they take time to react when will come forward with a difficult choice.

In other terms, once again their behavior could be described as human-like. It seems that the common ingredient in both human and operate action is a gene announced FOXP, which is closely linked to cognitive developed as humen. Pilots with defective FOXP take longer to arrive at policy decisions, just as flaws in the human type of FOXP have been correlated with low-toned intelligence.

It is this long and valuable history of consider of the drosophila that should guarantee its continued involvement in genetic investigate. But much of what has been very successful about working with operates is now being be repeated in human stem cell research, which has the added advantage of being species-relevant. This was the other is why Crowther moved into the private sector: the competition from stem cells meant that he found it increasingly difficult to get fruit fly-based experiment funded.

The fly is yesterdays person, he mentions, yesterdays engineering. For me, stem cells are the next fruit fly.

OKane searches fairly glum at the prospect and argues that there have been queries over the future of pomace fly study ever since he started his laboratory 25 years ago. But he maintains that the work hes done in inherited spastic paraplegia would have taken 10 times longer to perform with mouse. OKane has grown to appreciate the rich biological and social development of fruit flies in the time hes been working with them.

The more you look at their behavior, he says, the more sophisticated you realise they are. Even in aggressivenes, how a male pomace fly behaves in a fight is dependent on his previous experience of fighting with other male and female what the other males previous know-how of fighting is. Its amazing to be considered all the machinery thats involved to be able to do that. Undoubtedly were more sophisticated, because were studying them, theyre not analyse us.

For the time being, until some over-ambitious genetics professor does manage to mutate into a run, thats the practice the relationship should be pursued. And both humans and return wings, it is about to change, can drink to that.