Human parents who force alcohol down their children's throats
will find themselves in jail, but a new study shows that among
fruit flies and other fly species, liquoring up the kids is just
good parenting. Biologists at Emory University studied the
reproductive behavior of fruit flies in the presence of
parasitoid wasps. These wasp species lay their eggs in fruit fly
larvae, effectively using the young fruit flies as incubators.
The biologists divided fruit flies into two separate cages: one
containing a parasitoid wasp, the other without. Both cages
contained two petri dishes of food, one with a 6 percent alcohol
content and the other alcohol free. The results were
unambiguous; in the cage with the wasp, fruit flies laid their
eggs in the dish containing the alcohol 90 percent of the time,
whereas in the other cage only 40 percent of the eggs were laid
in the alcohol containing dish. Fruit flies have adapted to
tolerate highly alcoholic environments, while the wasps that
prey on them have not. Fruit fly larv