And I saw a great swamp, over which hung a black cloud of smoke, which was issuing from it. And in the swamp there swarmed a mass of little worms. Here were the souls of those who in the world had delighted in foolish merriment.
Animals recognize and discriminate among many different chemicals using their olfactory systems.
The Bargmann lab studies C. elegans 's responses to olfactory and water-soluble attractants, repellents, and pheremones. C. elegans chemotaxes to volatile odorants like benzaldehyde, using a sense of olfaction, and small water-soluble attractants like NaCl, using a sense of taste. The chemosensory neurons that sense volatile odorants are distinct from those that sense water-soluble attractants. Interstingly, a single neuron type can recognize several attractants that are distinguished by the animal. These genes might affect olfactory development, signal transduction, and integration of sensory information by the sensory neurons.