Fruit Flies Drink Away Their Bitterness

Rejected Male Fruit Flies Turn to Alcohol

This is something I ran into at Cracked.com (one of the funniest websites EVER)!

It’s all about sex and booze and fruit flies.

(Set ’em up, Joe!)

For many of us, failed relationships and alcohol go together like New Year’s Eve and also alcohol. That’s one of the pressures of being human; we have our big brains and big emotions, and we need big containers of liquor to forget the bad feelings they churn up. But surprisingly, humans aren’t the only creatures that do this.

Since fruit flies are very sexual beings in the first place, researchers wanted to find out what would happen when they were sexually rejected. This happens often with them, because female fruit flies are prudish things, as they don’t like having sex a second time after they’ve recently mated. If a second male tries to mount her, she’ll kick and run away, as you can see in the video below. Because hey, Mama fruit fly didn’t raise no ho.

After the flies had their time with the female, the researchers gave both males who had been rejected and those who’d gotten lucky the option of eating normal food or food spiked with alcohol. While the happy fruit flies had no preference for either option, the rejected fruit flies were significantly more likely to eat the alcohol-infused food.

And yes, at a basic level, it’s for the same reason you do it. Alcohol triggers reward chemicals in fruit fly brains, and when they don’t get that satisfaction from sex, they’ll get it from a bottle. Or a huge meal of alcohol-soaked food, in this case. And, with that, we’re going to estimate that it will be 48 hours before some depressed college kid tries to eat a pizza he has soaked in gin.

(“And now, I’m gonna play all the Radiohead songs I know at the same time.”)

Thanks again to that gang of zany madcaps over at Cracked.com!