We’ve long known that male fruit flies are attracted to alcohol, and now science knows why. It’s all about getting laid.
According to a new study, male fruit flies drink to make themselves more attractive to female fruit flies. Or maybe being drunk makes them think they’re more attractive to female fruit flies.
According to a study from the Max Planck Institute, an organization that has produced one fascinating study after another, alcohol, especially methanol, ramps up male fruit flies’ pheromone production. This makes them irresistible to female fruit flies. Alcohol allows them to secrete a natural perfume that gives off vibes of pure sex.
This is why you will often find fruit flies hanging around garbage, feeding off of the rotting fruit from which they get their nickname. Rotting fruit produces alcohol that they slurp up to help them get laid.
Male Fruit Flies Drink Alcohol To Make Themselves Attractive To Female Fruit Flies
The study’s author, Bill Hansson, said, “We don’t think flies drink alcohol because they are depressed.” This might be Hansson poking fun at a theory posed by a previous study that looked into why fruit flies love alcohol. It concluded that some fruit flies were just trying to get trashed to help soothe the pain of being rejected by female fruit flies.
Bill Hansson, the head of the Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology at the Max Planck Institute, said previous research teams were anthropomorphizing the flies, thinking they were getting drunk for emotional reasons. Instead, they’re just optimizing their reproductive chances.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading countless scientific studies over the years, it’s that the behavior of most kinds of animals can be attributed to some base physiological response that we humans can relate to. But we tend to intertwine it with the complexities of our brain and our emotional responses.
We’ve also probably watched too many animated Disney movies with talking animals.
Fruit flies seem to have a built-in failsafe to prevent them from becoming alcoholics. Alcohol is toxic to fruit flies, just as it is toxic to us, but you don’t see us carrying too much. Like us, they drink anyway, but they have three neural circuits in their brains that seem to be governing alcohol intake.
Two of them are all about getting wasted to attract females, but one of them is a failsafe that prevents them from getting too drunk. That one circuit is the friend of the party who is the voice of reason and takes away your car keys before you drunkenly wrap your Honda Civic around a tree.
So, the next time you see a fruit fly near your trash, just know: it’s probably trying to get laid. Fruit flies—they’re just like us.
The post Booze Makes Male Fruit Flies More Attractive to Females appeared first on VICE.
