101 YEARS OLD AND STILL LOGICALLY NEMATOLOGICAL...

BROWSING some of the latest academic research last week, I came across a paper in Nature about worms entitled “Past experience shapes sexually dimorphic neuronal wiring through monoaminergic signalling”.

Well I feel sure you will be as startled by that as I was and asking yourself how monoaminergic signalling can be influenced by past experience into shaping a worm’s sexually dimorphic neuronal wiring, so to save you the trouble of reading the paper, I shall tell you all about it.

What the researchers at Columbia University in New York did was to starve young worms before they had sexually matured and see what effect the resulting stress had on their future behaviour and development.

What they found was that environmental stress, in this case specifically starvation, can interrupt the process of sexual maturation in worms. Their development resumes when the stress passes but the worms then grow up to show immature behaviour including high sensitivity to a noxious chemical and having problems mating.

Naturally, I was fascinated by all this and rushed into my garden to find a worm to talk to about it and the very first nematode I came across was just what I was looking for. As soon as I asked whether he had seen the paper in Nature, he snarled and told me he’d been part of it, “and it was no fun at all,” he said.

“It must have been terrible,” I said sympathetically. “All that starvation-induced stress, then having these Americans watch you trying to have sex. Of all the worms in all the gardens in the world, I feel terribly lucky you have wriggled into mine.”

“What do you expect?” he said. “All the other worms are busy having it off with wormesses. It’s only us sexually stunted blokes who are left to wander around and talk to people like you.”

“I suppose so,” I said, “but tell me what do you think of the experiment and the conclusion the researchers draw? Does starvation really stress you out to such an extent that you grow up immature?”

Perhaps I had put that too harshly, for he then flew into the sort of vermicular rage you might expect from an immature worm teenager.

“Who are you calling immature?” he said. “I bet you’d have grown up afraid of all sorts of things if you have been starved when young. And it’s not as though they asked our permission. In fact I have it on good authority that the initial observation of neuronal rewiring after starvation came as a result of a complete accident when some worms were forgotten about in the lab and left without food for days. Then they starved some of us deliberately. It’s enough to make any worm too furious to mate,” and he stamped his tail in frustration.

“Calm down,” I advised. “You’re only attracting attention.”

But I was too late. For at that very moment, a starling swooped down from the sky and gobbled up the worm, then flew off without even saying thank you. It’s a hard life, being a worm.