I have been observing fruit flies in my house for some years now and have come to realized that the little bastards are plotting with murderous intent.
When I was a kid in both Halifax and Fredericton I don’t remember fruit flies. I have asked people in New England and they too don’t remember fruit flies rising like a dark cloud from any standing fruit every summer. My belief is that it is the advent of the green composting bin that has given fruit flies a toe-hold in our cities. I say our cities as I don’t seem to find the little asshats in the country. It is the density of the cities combined with the one and two week cycle of green bin pickup that I think have handed the fruit flies an environment where they can thrive. But that wasn’t good enough for the fruit flies. As it seems that they originally were only happy with fruit. But inconsiderately we humans threw all kinds of other things into our composting bins. Oatmeal, vegetables, moldy bread; all things that fruit flies didn’t used to like. Used to, as in they seem to like them now.
When I first observed fruit flies they loved fruit. Really loved fruit. This allowed for easy fruit fly traps that usually included a combination of fruit and/or vinegar. You would only find the fruit flies on or near the fruit and a good fruit fly trap would provide a fruit fly soup within a day. But three things changed. The fruit flies got a bit bigger. They now seem to like anything food like (soup, oatmeal, stew, and dirty sinks). They still have an affinity for fruit but they don’t seem to like vinegar much anymore. And the strangest change is that they now scurry around. Before, I never saw a landed fruit fly move much. They were either landed and still (either waiting or eating or something) or they were randomly flying about. But now they land and scurry in short quick little runs. This is entirely new behavior and I don’t know if they have evolved this or a new fruit fly is in town.
But this is where I become suspicious of murderous intent. Fruit flies are everywhere and in every house clean or dirty. If anything the more urbane your household the higher the probability of fruit flies by virtue of being a fruit buying and composting sort of household. So here we have a brand new and evolving potential vector for disease. Sort of like the flea and the black rat in the middle ages. So we have no effective programs in most eastern cities to fight the fruit fly as around here it poses no economic threat (yet) and it is landing on most of our food.
So my prediction is that in our effort to be greener healthier citizens that we have invited the devil in for dinner.