News & Plans

After getting abundant evidence for a rapid, robust, and readily reversible inhibition of egg-laying behavior (due to a dietary regimen), we are going to ask whether the same snail chow also inhibits mating behavior. We're going to blindly analyze a large number of three-hour time lapse video recordings of snails (groups of five) that have been feeding on either fresh lettuce or experimental chow: when they do mate, it's pretty easy to spot, as they stick together for quite a while. Here is a montage of raw footage. And here's an example of a video processed for analysis.

More plans: lettuce-fed and chow-fed snails are to be kept in artificial pondwater with and without a cocktail of antibiotics, to test the possibility that the effect of diet on reproductive behavior is mediated by symbiotic bacteria. Crazy idea, but might be true. Finally, samples of lettuce-fed and chow-fed snails are going to be preserved and sent off for RT-PCR quantification of the peptide hormone that's known to stimulate egg-laying. If we had enough money, we could compare their whole transcriptomes by RNAseq, and find out (quantitatively) how gene expression overall is affected. That would be great!