Fruit Fly - Tumblr Posts

These Little Bugs have Comically Giant Sperm

Some animals have sperm cells so ridiculously large they can be seen with the naked eye. And they’re probably the last ones you’d expect! 

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Dance of Development

I enjoyed the fruit fly embryonic development video from this post so much, I decided to animate it. Grow, little alien … grow like the wind!!!

Ok so I'm taking a genetics class right now and in lab we've been given fruit flies with different mutations that we need to breed over the course of the semester.

Now, first thing I learned: fruit flies don't eat fruit. They eat yeast. They eat the yeast on fermenting fruit. They can not actually eat fruit. Their name is a lie.

Secondly, one of the two mutant lines I was given to cross are flies with the apterous mutation, aka they're wingless. I feel so bad for them, they can't do the one thing they're named for, they cant fly.

And then I realized. My fruit flies are in truth insects that eat yeast and can't fly.

Anyways, I've been calling them my yeast crawls and I am their god now.

7 to 8 days at the soonest, but im projecting closer to 2 weeks. I expect a fully functional industrial civilization worshoping me by the end of the year.

so long as the evil bar eyes don't bring upon their downfall.

Ok so I'm taking a genetics class right now and in lab we've been given fruit flies with different mutations that we need to breed over the course of the semester.

Now, first thing I learned: fruit flies don't eat fruit. They eat yeast. They eat the yeast on fermenting fruit. They can not actually eat fruit. Their name is a lie.

Secondly, one of the two mutant lines I was given to cross are flies with the apterous mutation, aka they're wingless. I feel so bad for them, they can't do the one thing they're named for, they cant fly.

And then I realized. My fruit flies are in truth insects that eat yeast and can't fly.

Anyways, I've been calling them my yeast crawls and I am their god now.

I am viscerally imagining this in my head right now. Rehydrated potato, yeast, and ether.

I've started smelling it in places not in the lab and I don't know how to handle this.

Ok so I'm taking a genetics class right now and in lab we've been given fruit flies with different mutations that we need to breed over the course of the semester.

Now, first thing I learned: fruit flies don't eat fruit. They eat yeast. They eat the yeast on fermenting fruit. They can not actually eat fruit. Their name is a lie.

Secondly, one of the two mutant lines I was given to cross are flies with the apterous mutation, aka they're wingless. I feel so bad for them, they can't do the one thing they're named for, they cant fly.

And then I realized. My fruit flies are in truth insects that eat yeast and can't fly.

Anyways, I've been calling them my yeast crawls and I am their god now.

Man do I have a story for you!!!

So due to when my parental generations of flies pupated, the yeast crawls emerged as adults about a week before the other flies I have been assignedto breed them with emerged. Said flies have what is called the bar eye mutation, which changes the shape and size of their eyes.

So, flies hatching roughly 5ish days apart, results in me having collected my female apterous flies before their boyfriends had emerged. This ment there was a nice isolation period that allowed me to see that yes, all of the yeast crawls I had selected were in fact healthy and doing great in their new homes as they waited to get their boyfriends. On friday the bar eyes emerge and I am able to introduce the ladies to them. In the end I have four vials, 4 females and 4 males in each one. The flies are looking great, and I go home for the weekend feeling good.

On Monday I returned to tragedy. In one vial what I had initially identified as a female yeast crawl turned out to have actually been a chad male in disguise and he had been very busy with the three ladies, so that vial and its flies was no longer usable for the experiment. That would have been fine, if it were not for the fact that two of the other vials had died. So, im down to one vial and I email my professor because im not sure if one vial will be enough to get the end result of 500 second generation flies.

Three days and three unanswered emails later, the one surviving vial has a mass death. There are now only 3 surviving flies, 1 yeast crawl and her two boyfriends. There were no signs that the flies had mated.

Long story short, I was very unamused with my professor's inability to respond to my emails for days straight, however I was eventually able to talk with him and he has made me some new vials with healthy flies, which now two weeks later I have recived! They all seem to be doing good. Me and my proffer think what happened is that the bar eye flies had gotten infected with something, as the original batch of bar eyes I was given also had a lot of die off happen in it.

As for the one remaining original vial, great news! They eventualy actually successfully mated, and their children have emerged as adults! The two guys didn't live long enough to meet their kids, but mama yeast crawl did and is a very proud parent.

(Rip Wonky-Wings and Fat-Butt the male bar eyed fruit flies, your progeny have survived against the odds, and soon will have more flies join their ranks from the new vials.)

Ok so I'm taking a genetics class right now and in lab we've been given fruit flies with different mutations that we need to breed over the course of the semester.

Now, first thing I learned: fruit flies don't eat fruit. They eat yeast. They eat the yeast on fermenting fruit. They can not actually eat fruit. Their name is a lie.

Secondly, one of the two mutant lines I was given to cross are flies with the apterous mutation, aka they're wingless. I feel so bad for them, they can't do the one thing they're named for, they cant fly.

And then I realized. My fruit flies are in truth insects that eat yeast and can't fly.

Anyways, I've been calling them my yeast crawls and I am their god now.

So over the course of the last week of being the god of my wingless fruit fly civilization called Yeast Crawls i've learned something verrrry interesting about fruit flys and the different mutant strains. But first, let me tell you a bit about how you handle your flies.

You see, fruit flies are small. really small. So small you usually have to look at them under a microscope to really see anything about them. Unfortunately, fruit flies have this tendency to skitter arround and even fly off sometimes, which is not condusive to inspecting them under a microscope. So we use ether to knock them out. Simple solution, right?

Well as it turns out diffrent mutant fruit fly strains have diffrent resistances to ether.

I found this out after first handling the yeast crawls (apterous mutation) who are very receptive to ether. You just put them in a lil container with ether for about a minute and the fall asleep, and they will stay asleep for a solid 15 minutes. so I was expecting the flies of my other mutation (bar eyes) to also be easy to knock out.

I was wrong.

Turns out bar eye fruit flies have stupidly high resistance to ether. As in "put them in the etherlizer for 10+ minutes for them to finaly go down, take them out to put them under a microscope, they're already getting up and trying to fly away in 30 seconds" resistant to ether.

So yeah these lil flies with smaller, misshapened eyes are an absolute pain in my butt. JUST GO TO SLEEP ALREADY YOU NEAR SIGHTED NATTS.

The longer I live on this earth and the longer I spend in my genetics class, the more I think bug scientists are honestly right. These lil guys are so stupid and I love them so much.

Look at these little guys.

They're so small. They have such big, dumb, inocent eyes. They don't know that there's thousands of beings so much larger than they could ever comprehend who all think these lil flies are fantastic. They don't even know.

.... wait I was trying to write a post about cool things I've learned about these guys uuuHH-

hello yes plz keep us updated on the yeast crawls

Yall I have some FANTASTIC news: today I saw the first little F2 generation* larvae. It was so honking tiny. I could barely see the lil guy.

*F2 generation means the second generation after your original parents, so basically the grandkids of your first organisms you had bred. F2 generations also tend to be very.... sweet home Alabama, shall we say, which is done to get the resessive traits to get expressed in their ofspring that was expressed in the original parents.

Oh thats a HORRIFYING addition.

Can you imagine how much yeast a cat sized yeast crawl would consume??? There would be absolutely no way they wouldn't just flat out break out in their desire for yeast, and then they'd find the local brewery and eat all of their brewer's yeast, and I live in a small university/bar city so the local government would definitely come for my head for daring to harm the beer production.

They wouldn't care about the fact that scientific horrors had been unleashed on the public tho, they'd only care about the beer.

Ok so I'm taking a genetics class right now and in lab we've been given fruit flies with different mutations that we need to breed over the course of the semester.

Now, first thing I learned: fruit flies don't eat fruit. They eat yeast. They eat the yeast on fermenting fruit. They can not actually eat fruit. Their name is a lie.

Secondly, one of the two mutant lines I was given to cross are flies with the apterous mutation, aka they're wingless. I feel so bad for them, they can't do the one thing they're named for, they cant fly.

And then I realized. My fruit flies are in truth insects that eat yeast and can't fly.

Anyways, I've been calling them my yeast crawls and I am their god now.