Life, Death, & Cannibalism

SémIDEEV
 05/10/2023
 11:00:00
 Emily Siff, Etudiante en thèse chez John Carlson à Yale
 IDEEV - Salle Rosalind Franklin

Where there is life, there is death. Death can occur due to a variety of factors, such as lack of resources, disease, predation, and old age. Although death may be a common occurrence, how animals sense and respond to the dead of their own kind (conspecifics) remains curiously unexplored. Utilizing behavioral, genetic, neural, and computational approaches in the fruit fly (Drosophila), this work seeks to elucidate fundamental questions about how animals sense and respond to the dead. While death is often viewed as an aversive state, this research uniquely studies contexts in which death has a positive valence, thus generating entirely new findings, as well as re-contextualizing previous work Zooming out, this research contributes to a larger, interspecies body of work that has begun to suggest that life, death, and cannibalism are closely intertwined.