Drown Parasites with Alcohol
This is a wild one. The day to day happenings and goings on for a fruit fly can be unexciting, dangerous, and questionable as to how to apply long-tested survival methods to say the least. The pesky flies will get no love from Mother Nature. We already found out that the common stripe is against them. Now, they have to deal with the offspring of the scary, larger enemy, the horrific wasp.
Fruit flies dine on fruit. Fruit provides a perfect breeding ground for their maggot children. Wasps know this and lay their own eggs inside the fruit maggots. The maggots grow up and the eggs inside them develop into wasp juniors and eat their way out of a living fly. Got all that? So what is a fly to do? Get drunk! Kill those bastard parasites with alcohol.
The fruit rots and releases ethanol. The fruit fly drinks this alcohol. The parasite living inside dies. Nature seems to have discovered a way to combat dangerous adversaries with alcohol. This looks like a very interesting and very exciting proposition. I do wonder if the scientists secretly discovered their findings with a bit of champagne and called it advanced research or not.
[ images via: erratica, Mental Floss ]
