Saturday, August 28, 2021

Git Along, Tiny Dogies

We're going into farming. We bought everything we need for a protein farm and I don't mean beans, baby. Animal husbandry. Yippee-Ki-Yay. Ordinarily I'm leery of these sorts of projects and balk at the learning curve, but this one seems like a slam-dunk. We're raising fruit flies.

It doesn't take long to whomp up a complete fruit fly out of practically nothing. The mommy fruit fly lays eggs and poops on them, which really revs up the larvae. There are stages. At one point the larval fruit flies are said to encapsulate in the puparium, and nobody wants to see that.

Fruit fly courtship is nice though. The male vibrates his wings and then licks the female's genitalia, and although I wouldn't make a point of watching, I wouldn't necessarily look away either. The female fruit fly is said to be receptive to the male within ten hours of emerging as an adult. Well, no shit. What with one thing and a mother, you basically get a whole new set of fruit flies every few minutes in warm weather.

I have read up a little. The literature insists there is such a thing as "virgin" and "naïve" fruit flies, the naïve ones being virgins that have not even observed copulation, and there are distinct behaviors associated with each. For instance, sexually experienced males spend less time courting and more time mounting, and naïve males are more likely to try to court sexually immature females, when they could just, like, wait an hour. The whole fruit fly life cycle peters out after about fifteen days, after all, assuming it is not cut short by a hummingbird.

But that's the plan. We're raising meat for the hummingbirds. Hummingbirds need solid protein and usually find it in the form of insects or spiders. A hummingbird can edit the spider right out of her web in nothing flat. And that's the sort of thing she'll need to feed her own babies. They aren't all about sucking flowers. She doesn't just funnel nectar into the wee ones.

So, in theory, we will put a banana peel in our fruit fly corral and be in business right soon.

There's a reason people know things like whether a given individual fruit fly has watched fruit fly porn. Fruit flies are one of the most-studied critters on the planet. They're easy. You can study generations of them in practically no time and they are easily herded, using simple tools like tweezers and undergraduate students.

I'm not too worried about achieving mature, well-marbled fruit flies in our corral, from whence both hummers and bushtits should be able to belly-up for take-out. It is true that in season we have literal tons of rotting fruit on the ground in this neighborhood, figs to plums to berries to apples to, in fact, bananas, in quantities that will seem unfathomable come the big earthquake. So we won't run out of fruit flies. The reason to keep them in a corral is the same as for any bird feeder. It's not so much that our birds need our help. It's that we want to watch.

Fruit flies are so good at replicating themselves that for centuries it was believed they spontaneously generated. The ancients believed they just appeared out of nothing, materialized right out of the aether. Which is nuts.

They're thinking of blog posts.

27 comments:

  1. I remember in high school biology class, we had a choice: dissect a pregnant cat or breed and study fruit flies. As you might have guessed, the students divvied up along gender lines: the boys cut some pussy, while the girls watched fruit flies breed. I don't think I learned anything from it, and really, the only thing I WANT to know about fruit flies is how to get rid of them. (Bottle with a narrow neck, a bit of cider vinegar in the bottom, cover top of bottle tightly with plastic wrap, poke a small hole in the top, and set it out near your fruit bowl. They smell the vinegar, go "Yum!", go through the hole and cannot get out again. They get tired, fall into the vinegar and drown.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You catch more flies with vinegar than with honey.

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    3. Yeah, but if you REALLY want to catch a lot of flies, try using shit.

      (Though fruit flies are another matter. As the saying goes, "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

      Delete
  2. This made me feel like a teenager again, getting aroused reading about the mating practices of fruitflies. My morning shower is going to be a cool one!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Reading about them, especially as Murr described it, sounds good. Trying to SEE them doing it is another matter. You gotta have GOOD eyes!

      Delete
  3. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. (Groucho Marx I think)

    ReplyDelete
  4. An outdoor ventilated hanging-up compost bin! Cool!

    Have you ever noticed how fast fruit flies learn to avoid being smushed? The first time they are attacked they suffer multiple casualties (I would preen except smushed fruit flies - ugh); the next time they are executing evasive manoeuvres like nobody's business.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lantern flies are the same way. They are terribly invasive and kill trees here in the US, as they have no native predators here. They came here on cargo from China. At first, I can swat them like the freakin' Terminator. Then, they get more crafty. It's like a video game where they keep upping the level you have to perform at.

      I have learned, however, that the common house fly is easier to Kill/catch and release toward dusk, as their compound eyes tire them greatly by then and they are ready for sleep.

      Delete
    2. And here I am with open windows and no screens, only the occasional buzzing housefly to observe.

      Delete
    3. Yes, but the second time they were deaf from the loud clap.

      Delete
  5. You are growing them on purpose, while we are trying to eradicate the little buggers as they merrily flit about spoiling home grown fruits and spreading throughout the suburbs. There are widespread bans in many of our suburbs now with people not being allowed to share fruit with neighbours or visitors and any fallen fruits must be gathered and properly disposed of. Many trees have little yellow fruit fly traps hanging in them and there is talk of releasing a sterile males soon to reduce the numbers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Have you tried the cider vinegar hack that I mentioned in my first comment? It works pretty well for me, but it sounds like you have a regular invasion on your hands!

      Delete
    2. Yes, this sounds like a much more major event. I'm not sure I knew fruit flies spoil good fruit.

      Delete
    3. They lay their eggs in the fruit and the larvae hatch and wriggle, I don't have any fruit trees, not much of a garden at all, but the suburbs that have a lot of Greeks and Italians have large gardens and they are being hit by fruit flies that cross the borders in fresh fruit deliveries from other states. They get into tomatoes, peaches, apricots. If you cut into a tomato and see the little wrigglers, you pretty much have to destroy your whole crop.

      Delete
    4. And now I'm guessing you might actually mean those tiny black midges/gnats that hang around the fruit bowl when the fruit is too old and spoiling, not the things I know as fruit flies that are so damaging to crops.

      Delete
  6. Kitchen fruit flies can also be trapped by setting out a little dish of red wine to which you've added a few drops of dish detergent. The wine attracts them. The soap makes the wine more slippery by reducing surface tension. Flies fall in and die happy, if a soapy drunk is happy, and I say he is.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I say so, too, but what a waste of wine! Still, if they are REALLY annoying, it sounds worth it. Wonder if it would also work on dinner guests who just won't go home.

      Delete
  7. I don't leave fruit around in the kitchen long enough to breed the critters, but I did learn that they are happy to breed in damp soil, so now we have no more houseplants either, except for one orchid. A couple of years ago I covered the soil of the potted wisterias with a layer of gravel. That helped. I can't remember why I decided to move them outside anyway. I can't remember a lot of things.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We have a LOT of houseplants. Not as many as we once had, however. We have always "summered" them on our deck. However, in the last few years, insects have really preyed upon them. Some of them (RIP, Hibiscuses) were HUGE... and died from thripes. We have to keep our Peace Lilies inside, because there are all sorts of bugs out there waiting to demolish them. I suspect our Prayer Plant is dying, though Paul is in denial. Our Norfolk Pines are getting to be too big to bring back into the house, so we will probably have to let them stay outside to die. It's really difficult letting go of these plants; they've been with us for decades. We have grown to love them immensely. But with climate change making more bugs appear to feed on them plus just the usual entropy that happens to all living things, we have far fewer plants than we used to.

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    3. Snails chewed our Peace Lilies right down to the ground. Norfolk Island Pines? Auracaria excelsia, which gets over 50 feet tall? That's going to need one big pot, unless you've figured out how to make bonsai out of them. (I'm trying to do that with my wisterias, but I am, to say the least, an amateur at that...)

      Delete
    4. Oops, my mistake. Make that "over 75 feet tall." Unless you're on Norfolk Island, where it can go to 200...

      Delete
    5. Wisteria in a pot? If I turn my back on our planted wisteria, it's on the neighbor's house.

      Delete