Microbes play a huge role in our nutrition, our immunity, maybe even our mental health. But we humans aren't the only ones that rely on these armies of resident bacteria. Baby cockroaches, the cockroaches that just emerge from the egg, don't have any gut bacteria. That's Coby Schal, an entomologist and chemical ecologist at North Carolina State University. The first thing they do is they take a nice feces meal: basically, eating the poop, eating the feces of their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers.
微生物对我们的营养吸收、免疫系统、甚至是心理健康都发挥着重要的作用。但我们人类并不是唯一依赖这些常驻细菌大军的物种。蟑螂幼虫，也就是刚刚从蛋里孵化出来的蟑螂，没有任何肠道细菌。科比·沙尔是北卡罗莱纳州立大学的昆虫学家和化学生态学家。它们做的第一件事就是美美地吃一顿粪便，基本上是吃兄弟姐妹和爸爸妈妈的粪便。
That excrement inoculates the roaches with beneficial gut bugs, Schal says. And it's also a longevity-boosting nutritional supplement. But the weirdest thing is, the poop actually calls the tots to come hither. Because it's laced with compounds, like fatty acids, that attract roaches of all ages. The substances are called aggregation pheromones. So poop essentially serves as a rallying call to congregate - and feast.
沙尔表示，这些粪便能给蟑螂接种肠道益生菌。这也是一种延长寿命的营养补充剂。但最奇怪的是，这些便便其实会召唤幼虫过来。因为这些便便里面掺有如脂肪酸之类的化合物，能吸引各个年龄段的蟑螂。这些物质名叫聚集信息素。所以，便便实际上充当了召唤蟑螂聚餐的召集令。
To determine where the attractive chemicals come from, Schal and his colleagues raised a group of sterile, microbe-free cockroaches - and then collected their excrement. But as they suspected, the sterile stuff, without any microbial by-products, failed to tantalize the other roaches. So they then gave the sterile bugs a fecal transplant. So we took feces of normal cockroaches, and exposed sterile cockroaches to those feces. They very readily eat these feces and they incorporate the microbes, the bacteria from these feces, into their gut. And these cockroaches then produce the aggregation pheromone again. They published the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
为了确定这些吸引蟑螂的化学物质从何而来，沙尔和他的同事饲养了一批无菌的蟑螂，并且搜集了它们的粪便。但正如他们所怀疑的那样，没有微生物的帮助，这些无菌的粪便并不能吸引其他蟑螂。于是他们给这些无菌蟑螂做了一次粪便接种。我们搜集了一些普通蟑螂的粪便，然后让无菌蟑螂接触这些粪便。他们非常乐意地吃了这些粪便，并且从中吸收了微生物，然后这些蟑螂也能产生聚集信息素。他们将结果发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》上。
These results suggest gut bacteria may do a lot more than we thought - including, at least for cockroaches, aiding communication. That's a plus for us - because we might be able to hijack those compounds to build better baits and traps. So we can make sure that roaches check in but they don't check out.
实验结果表明，肠道细菌的作用或许比我们想象的要多——包括，至少对于蟑螂来说，辅助交流。这对我们人类来说是一个优势——因为我们或许能利用这些化合物制作更有效的诱饵和陷阱。这样我们就能保证小强们有进无出了。
