GaryGaulin
Posts: 5385 Joined: Oct. 2012
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This is turning out to be an awesome paper!
Quote | Taste Perception in Honey Bees
Maria Gabriela de Brito Sanchez
Université Paul Sabatier, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse Cedex 9, France
2CNRS, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse Cedex 9, France
Abstract
Taste is crucial for honeybees for choosing profitable food sources, resins, water sources, and for nestmate recognition. Peripheral taste detection occurs within cuticular hairs, the chaetic and basiconic sensilla, which host gustatory receptor cells and, usually a mechanoreceptor cell. Gustatory sensilla are mostly located on the distal segment of the antennae, on the mouthparts, and on the tarsi of the forelegs. These sensilla respond with varying sensitivity to sugars, salts, and possibly amino acids, proteins, and water. So far, no responses of receptor cells to bitter substances were found although inhibitory effects of these substances on sucrose receptor cells could be recorded. When bees are free to express avoidance behaviors, they reject highly concentrated bitter and saline solutions. However, such avoidance disappears when bees are immobilized in the laboratory. In this case, they ingest these solutions, even if they suffer afterward a malaise-like state or even die from such ingestion. Central processing of taste occurs mainly in the subesophageal ganglion, but the nature of this processing remains unknown. We suggest that coding tastants in terms of their hedonic value, thus classifying them in terms of their palatability, is a basic strategy that a central processing of taste should achieve for survival. |
I am very sure I had no problem figuring out what the last sentence of the Abstract is saying. But seeing how I'm supposed to be lost in junk I just made up then everyone please set me straight, by explaining it all too me, especially how to most simply model that.
-------------- The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
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