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A Necessary Prerequisite For A Full Understanding Of Any Species ' Behavior Includes Possessing Comprehensive Knowledge Of Their Respective

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A necessary prerequisite for a full understanding of any species’ behavior includes possessing comprehensive knowledge of their respective sensory world. Here we attempted to determine the sensory threshold for a response to sweetness in both the flesh fly Sarcophaga bullata and Homo sapiens. Flies and humans alike were exposed to increasingly concentrated solutions of glucose and monitored for a positive response, indicative of the detection of sweetness. Results from our experiment strongly indicate the population threshold for sweetness detection in S. bullata resides at a glucose solution concentration level of 1%, while humans exhibited an increased sweetness sensitivity, with the population threshold appearing at 0.1%. However, while …show more content…

al. 2004). Important takeaways from these studies indicate that members of the taxa tend to be most responsive to simple and sweet flavored carbohydrates (Dethier 1955, as quoted in Jakinovich et. al. 1971). However, taxa members responses to amino acids have been shown to be more subtle, if present at all, with Potter and Bertin (1988), for example, determining no significant response to a variety of amino acid solutions in S. bullata.

Traditionally, experimental analysis of Homo sapiens taste thresholds has similarly focused on these two classes of biomolecules, with similar sweetness thresholds as those exhibited by members of the taxa Insecta being established in H. sapiens with respect to simple carbohydrates. For example, while Scheiner et. al. in (2003) (as quoted in Scheiner et al. 2004), demonstrated that a sucrose concentration above 3% was sufficient to induce a positive sweetness detection rate of close to 60% in a population of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, Richard Bowen (2016) has indicated the H. sapiens population response threshold resides around sucrose concentrations of 3.4%.

Recently however, the movement away from the high calorie content of simple carbohydrate sweeteners in the human diet, has generated an industry of artificial sweeteners commonly utilized by H.

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