In a series of rooms in the Fly Facility of the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University, around 5m fruit flies are kept in test tubes at any given time. They’re stored at different temperatures to determine varying lengths of life cycle – at 25C, it’s about 10 days; at cooler temperatures as long as five weeks. Out in the wild, there is no pest quite so sympathetic to human needs as the humble fruit…
In praise of the humble fruit fly
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