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Hey there,
Fruit flies have a drinking problem.
Except sometimes, it is more of a drinking solution.
Fruit flies spend much of their lives around fermenting fruit, where yeast naturally produces alcohol. Over millions of years, they have become remarkably good at tolerating ethanol.
Which comes in handy when someone tries to eat them from the inside.
Enter: the parasitoid wasp
Certain tiny wasps have a deeply unpleasant reproductive strategy.
They inject their eggs inside fruit fly larvae.
The wasp egg hatches.
The baby wasp starts growing.
The fruit fly becomes lunch.
Nature!
But researchers discovered something strange.
When some infected fruit fly larvae are given a choice between normal food and food containing alcohol, they can preferentially consume the boozy option.
Because fruit flies can handle alcohol better than the wasps can.
The ethanol creates a hostile environment for the parasite, increasing the fly's chances of surviving.
In other words:
The fruit fly gets drunk to kill the thing living inside it.
Possibly the most aggressive prescription ever written.
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Mom knows the trick, too
Adult female fruit flies can also lay their eggs in alcohol-containing environments.
For the developing flies, fermented fruit is tolerable.
For some parasitoid wasps?
Much less so.
What looks like a toxic environment can become a tiny chemical fortress.
Bug Wisdom
We tend to divide things neatly into categories:
Good for you.
Bad for you.
Nature is usually less cooperative.
A substance can be poison to one organism and protection to another.
A stressful environment can be dangerous in one circumstance and useful in another.
Sometimes the difference isn't the thing itself.
It's the dose, the context, and who's encountering it.
Which is either a profound lesson about nature...
or the most elaborate excuse a fruit fly has ever given for day drinking.
— Gabi & Bea
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