Electric Josh

For some reason, probably wine or coffee related, we ended up with a bunch of fruit flies in the kitchen. They're nasty. Fortunately, my excellent colleague is married to a cell biologist, who is just the sort of person who has to years of experience with unbelievable numbers of escaped fruit flies. I had thought, years ago, of putting a mason jar of stinky fruit out in the open and then, after twenty-four hours, screwing on the lid and throwing the whole thing away, the idea being that all the fruit flies would lay their eggs in the jar and that they'd hatch inside a mason jar in a distant landfill where they wouldn't bother me. It works sort of well, but this new solution from the former drosophila biologist is more effective, and certainly much more elegant:

1. Pour several ounces of apple cider vinegar into a glass. (Having only regular vinegar, I instead used white wine with a slice of way-past-ripe banana from the fridge. Long story.)
2. Apply several drops of dish soap. Stir.
3. Wait for flies to magically disappear from the room.

Normally, when a small beast like a fruit fly lands in a glass of water, the water's surface tension supports they fly's weight and the fly can conceivably squirm over to the side of the glass, walk out, and continue to fly around looking for fruit to foul. But a soapy liquid wets the fly, and gravity, with no bug-water interface to overcome (now there's a soap-bug and a soap-water interface instead), pulls the fly under. Terminal velocity for a submerged fruit fly looks to be something like half an inch per second. Of course, now there's a dense layer of dead fruit flies in the bottom of the glass. It's a bit gross, but much less so than having them flying about the kitchen. If you try this, do remember to toss your eau de d. melanogaster down the drain at some point. Tadaa!
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