The Condimentary Preferences of Drosophila
L. Prism* and T. H. Morgan Cat, Insititute of Pissing About
* Author for correspondence. The authors contributed unequally to the manuscript, and the junior author jumped up on the counter and tried to eat the Marmite.
In a small-scale survey of the dietary preferences of kitchen Drosophila (species unknown), we find, contrary to received wisdom, that you catch significantly more flies with vinegar than with honey. However, no condiment tested was sufficiently attractive or lethal to comprise a promising direction for future pest control strategies. Further analysis of drosophilan gastronomic leanings suggests they may be middle class.
Fig. 1. Flies were counted at sporadic intervals over a 1-hour timescale as they visited this array of foodstuffs. Here, a fly visits Malt Extract. The total number of flies at each food was (left to right, top row first): Brandy, 2; Fish sauce, 0; Golden syrup, 0; Honey, 0; Hot sauce, 1; Jam (peach), 0; Malibu, 1; Malt extract, 4; Marmite, 1; Molasses, 0; Pomegranate molasses, 0; Soy sauce, 3; Tomato ketchup, 6; Water, 3; Vinegar (balsamic), 13; Vinegar (cider), 5. There was no significant difference between sexes and if you want true replication you can whistle for it.
Popular sentiment overwhelmingly supports the concept that ethanoic acid is unalluring to dipterans (1). However, some academic opinion disagrees (2). We here present results indicating that flies prefer vinegar not only to honey (p<0.01), but to a range of sauces and dressings from various cultural traditions. Concoctions incorporating vinegar (hot sauce, ketchup) were popular, as was malt extract, a substance more often associated with fictional Carnivora (3). Many wells received fewer visits than the water control, either because these were actively repulsive or because of the flies' propensity to wander into the control from the adjacent vinegar. An indication of the flies' social standing can perhaps be gleaned from their preference for balsamic over cider vinegar, and brandy over Malibu, although this result is only marginally significant (pooled posh v common, p=0.06, binomial test). It should also be noted that even vinegar drew considerably fewer visits than the bin, and furthermore, at no point did any fly get stuck and die. We conclude that culinary seasonings make an ineffective substitute for conventional insecticide treatment.
Acknowledgements
We thank B. Nana and A. Rella for helpful comments on a previous manuscript.
References
1. Googlefight
2. Green, M. M. 2002. Genetics 162:1-3
3. Milne, A. A. 1928. Tigger has breakfast. H. Pooh. Corn. 2: 7-9.
* Author for correspondence. The authors contributed unequally to the manuscript, and the junior author jumped up on the counter and tried to eat the Marmite.
In a small-scale survey of the dietary preferences of kitchen Drosophila (species unknown), we find, contrary to received wisdom, that you catch significantly more flies with vinegar than with honey. However, no condiment tested was sufficiently attractive or lethal to comprise a promising direction for future pest control strategies. Further analysis of drosophilan gastronomic leanings suggests they may be middle class.
Fig. 1. Flies were counted at sporadic intervals over a 1-hour timescale as they visited this array of foodstuffs. Here, a fly visits Malt Extract. The total number of flies at each food was (left to right, top row first): Brandy, 2; Fish sauce, 0; Golden syrup, 0; Honey, 0; Hot sauce, 1; Jam (peach), 0; Malibu, 1; Malt extract, 4; Marmite, 1; Molasses, 0; Pomegranate molasses, 0; Soy sauce, 3; Tomato ketchup, 6; Water, 3; Vinegar (balsamic), 13; Vinegar (cider), 5. There was no significant difference between sexes and if you want true replication you can whistle for it.
Popular sentiment overwhelmingly supports the concept that ethanoic acid is unalluring to dipterans (1). However, some academic opinion disagrees (2). We here present results indicating that flies prefer vinegar not only to honey (p<0.01), but to a range of sauces and dressings from various cultural traditions. Concoctions incorporating vinegar (hot sauce, ketchup) were popular, as was malt extract, a substance more often associated with fictional Carnivora (3). Many wells received fewer visits than the water control, either because these were actively repulsive or because of the flies' propensity to wander into the control from the adjacent vinegar. An indication of the flies' social standing can perhaps be gleaned from their preference for balsamic over cider vinegar, and brandy over Malibu, although this result is only marginally significant (pooled posh v common, p=0.06, binomial test). It should also be noted that even vinegar drew considerably fewer visits than the bin, and furthermore, at no point did any fly get stuck and die. We conclude that culinary seasonings make an ineffective substitute for conventional insecticide treatment.
Acknowledgements
We thank B. Nana and A. Rella for helpful comments on a previous manuscript.
References
1. Googlefight
2. Green, M. M. 2002. Genetics 162:1-3
3. Milne, A. A. 1928. Tigger has breakfast. H. Pooh. Corn. 2: 7-9.
posted by MissPrism at 10:54 AM
26 Comments:
That is awesome :)
They're called vinegar flies for a reason. Great experiment -- this will become part of my arsenal in getting molecular biologists to stop referring to them as fruit flies.
Yay for practical science!
A fine experiment! I just wanted to stop by and say I liked your blog title... Now I'm off to eat some muffins. ;-)
Where are the graphs?
I'm not surprised about the fish sauce. Horrible stuff. Did you try chavvy chip shop malt or distilled vinegar (or the mysterious 'non-brewed condiment')? Or even the weird HP/vinegar concoction they serve in Scotland?
I would have liked to have seen some corroborative evidence for the adage 'fruit flies like a banana', but other than that an elegant piece of work.
Excellent work, indeed.
It reminded me of the 1981 Held and Yodzis paper "On the Einstein-Murphy Interaction", which analyzed the system of bread, jam, and gravity. (And it's online in it's entirety.)
Your household foodstuff analysis nicely complements the earlier work of Held and Yodzis. Thanks for your contribution.
(Also, perhaps the commenter who requested graphs would be appeased by Held and Yodzis' Figure 6, Rainfall in Switzerland.)
If you're actually trying to get rid of the flies (though I'm not sure why you would want to, as they are so cute), here's a method I've used effectively.
Take a small-mouthed glass jar and put some dry yeast in the bottom. Add a bit of water to make a yeast paste. Fold an index card into a funnel with a tiny opening at the bottom and tape this funnel into the glass jar. Make sure to tape around the entire mouth of the glass jar. The flies will enter the jar to go after the yeast, but very few of them will be bright enough to find the tiny opening to let them back out. Within two weeks, your kitchen fruit fly problem should be over...
You had me at "drosophilan gastronomic leanings"
What a perfect bit of scientific investigation...does this absolve me from the stack of journal articles on my desk?
SCIENCE! Cor.
*sits back in awe*
Do the posh one wear tiny top hats?
Excellent work.
Wonderful. I salute The Institute.
Thanks everyone! Brad, I did as you suggested, and baited the trap with the dregs of a bottle of wine. Very helpful.
Tim, please don't remind me of the time I spent working in an Edinburgh chipshop!
Shudders, remembering brown sauce in paper cuts and being referred to as "hen."
The link to the Held and Yodzis paper that was previously posted didn't work for me. I was able to find it here.
This is delightful. I yearn to use the phrase "posh v common" in conjunction with a p-value.
RPM, thanks for catching the defective link to the Held and Yodzis paper. It serves to illustrate the Murphy half of the Einstein-Murphy Interaction, does it not?
That's my story. I stick with it, like a condiment on a compact manifold admitting a well-behaved foliation.
--
You have to put a tiny droplet of dish soap in the vinegar to break the surface tension - then they'll drown.....
What fun, your blog site is now very firmly on my favourites list! You're so right about skills with written English - it was the received wisdom when I did my Engineering degree that "engineers can't communicate". Eventually I proved them wrong (?)by going back to school and becoming a solicitor - where skill with the written word is (allegedly) paramount.
Surprise - most lawyers are crap at written English too! Ho hum...
Keep up the good work,
Willy Wonka
SCIENCE! Bookmarks :D
Brad! Brad Jones? lord of the fruit flies? izzat you??
Thank you! I'm doing a PhD on visual-olfactory integration in Drosophila, but I've been having trouble finding a sufficiently attractive odour for my experiment. I'm going to buy some balsamic vinegar right now.
Finlay - let me know if it helps your work! That would please me greatly.
One of my friends sent me here after I linked him to this XKCD strip: http://xkcd.com/357/
I was so impressed by your experiment and write-up that I had to submit it to the folks over at http://www.improbable.com .
Do you still have the image file for Figure 1? (The link appears to be broken, currently.) Thanks!
I hope you get the ig-noble!!! I think ur brilliant.
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