Solitary Living Brings a Decreased Weight and an Increased Agility to the Domestic Silkworm, Bombyx mori

SIMPLE SUMMARY: We identified and validated that solitary living brings a decreased weight and an increased agility to silkworms. Solitary silkworms have a faster movement in response to food or physical stress than group-living counterparts. These contradict previous thoughts that solitary or lonely life is always harmful to animals or humans. We identified differently expressed genes (DEGs) and microRNAs (DEmiRNAs) resulted from solitary living. These DEGs and DEmiRNAs are functionally associated with the phenotypic changes led by solitary living. ABSTRACT: The domestic silkworms, Bombyx mori, always live in groups and little is known of the outcomes of solitary living. We bred solitary silkworms and performed a comprehensive investigation of the difference between solitary and group-living silkworms. The results show that solitary silkworms had significantly lower weights than group-living counterparts. Moreover, solitary silkworms had faster movements under food luring or heat stress than the group-living ones, supported by extensive behavior experiments. These findings inferred that an increased agility resulted from solitary living. For an understanding of the molecular mechanism associated with solitary living, we performed integrated mRNA and miRNA (microRNA) sequencing of tissues for solitary and group-living silkworms. We identified 165 differently expressed genes (DEGs) and 6 differently expressed miRNAs between the solitary and group-living silkworms. Functional and pathway analyses indicated that these DEGs are associated with weight loss and agility increase. These findings compose a sketch depicting an association between the phenotypes and genes resulted from solitary living and refresh the understanding of solitary living and loneliness, which has an increased prevalence in our modern society.