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ok I"m finally going to ask a lol question where do fruit flys come from none in house till i open fruit bam.
do they follow me home they come out of the walls when i open a cantalope i don't see them on the fruit when i buy it they hide some place go ahead let me have it lol
4 Answers
- 1 decade agoFavorite Answer
Where Fruit Flies Come From
You reach for the peaches you brought home yesterday and spots swim before your eyes as fruit flies swarm up from the bowl. You stare hard at a peach, but see no evidence of maggoty teenagers wriggling forth from its flesh to hatch and take wing. Where'd the little buggers come from?
This very mystery -- vermin from nowhere -- gave rise to a charming and durable belief called "spontaneous generation."
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Until about 100 years ago, people were innocent of the concept of a fly's life-cycle, wherein it is obliged to pass through various stages from egg to larva to adult. Rather, they observed that if you left a piece of meat lying around, flies miraculously emerged from it.
This enchanting bit of unnatural history was first attacked by a 17th-century Italian doctor who hit on the grand notion of covering up the meat: No more flies.
But I think fruit flies still make a fair case for spontaneous generation. The first time I had an opportunity to ask a fruit-fly expert where the fruit flies in my kitchen came from, he got very defensive and insisted that, despite what his neighbors claimed, they didn't come from his genetics laboratory.
I later saw his laboratory, and while I would have sided with his neighbors, it turns out fruit flies are wild animals.
"They're native to most areas of the country," says Colorado State University entomologist Whitney Cranshaw. "They come from outdoors."
They come when they smell your peaches rolling across the ripeness line.
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Fruit flies prefer a diet of yeast, that marvelous microbe that eats fruit and spits out alcohol. Since flies disdain unripe fruit, and since that is precisely the sort of colorful paperweight that supermarkets tend to distribute, it's more likely that your Drosophila melanogaster came from the great outdoors than from the grocery store.
The obvious next question is, if the peaches came home "clean," and there are flies on them now, how long will it be before there are eggs or larvae (AKA "maggots," of course) inside the peaches? Do you eat the peaches, or not? The answer is there could be eggs on the fruit instantly, and 30 hours later, larvae -- perhaps 500 of them.
If you don't disturb their happy community, the tiny, white larvae will spend five or six days gobbling the yeast and alcohol-rich products of fermentation, then crawl out of the sludge, hatch into red-eyed monsters and start the cycle again.
And once they're established in your house, they can sustain themselves on an impressive range of nutrients. They can live on the slime inside a sink drain. They can flourish on a sour mop. They'll eat damp flour or food fermenting quietly in a crack in the floor. They've even proven capable of existing on a diet of alcohol fumes, their bodies deploying a special chemical that converts the alcohol to nourishment before it can poison them.
And in their eight-day life cycle, they breed prolifically.
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Some thoughtful soul has gone to the trouble of calculating that one pair of flies, in one year, can produce a dynasty that, packed in a ball, would fill the void between the Earth and the Sun. And that was at just 100 eggs per female. Some sources say they lay 1,000.
This sort of fecundity, however, is often a hallmark of small brains and a high death rate. Because they're slow to anticipate treachery, for instance, fruit flies are easy to trap. A wine bottle with a bit of fruit or wine in the bottom and a cone of paper set funnel-style in the top works brilliantly, though Cranshaw notes that the trap may also attract your victims' country cousins.
All things considered, prevention seems key: Just eat the peach.
- kuhlmannLv 45 years ago
the perfect possible thank you to rid your place of fruit flies is to scrub the placement! get rid of all the culmination you have sitting out; wash them contained in the sink, and placed them contained in the refrigerator (in the event that they are good), or throw them away. sparkling the aspects the place the fruit became saved, and submit some fly strips... (they are no longer purely for houseflies!)... after some days, (their eggs could be around. you will possibly be waiting to convey new fruit into the abode. in case you like to go away your fruit out, because of the fact they do decorate a healthful abode, wash all your culmination & vegetables (which you go away out), no longer purely in the previous you eat them, yet once you convey them abode! in many cases the eggs of the flies in question, come from the culmination, as they the place picked from the farm... finished with fruit fly eggs! I wash all my F&V while they arrive abode, (or off the timber contained in the decrease back backyard), and back, in the previous I eat them!
- DJLv 61 decade ago
Cornerstonefaith1--That was more than I ever really wanted to know about that! I'll keep my fruit in the fridge now!