What made this observation even more interesting for the scientists is that fruit flies are vegetarian.
That revelation has been confirmed in mice, fruit flies, dogs and other lab animals.
Best of all, experiments on fruit flies are not subject to vetting by ethics committees.
Dobzhansky integrated genetics into what became known as the neoDarwinian synthesis with his work on fruit flies.
From fruit flies to elephants, if you give them the source of alcohol and sugar, they love it.
Acrimonious battles have raged for years over the correct monikers for certain shrimp, snails, fruit flies, butterflies and dinosaurs.
The Period, or "Per, " gene is one of the most important clock genes known in fruit flies and mammals.
Dozens more longevity genes have been found in tiny worms and fruit flies.
Mangoes in Africa, as elsewhere, often fall prey to fruit flies, which destroy about 40% of the continent's crop.
By contrast, in natural populations of fruit flies the number of copies of copia is low around 20 per individual.
Biologists have been studying fruit flies for almost a century, so they now know quite a lot about them.
The team's latest work draws not on human subjects, but on fruit flies.
In addition, there is growing circumstantial evidence for hybrid speciation in Ragoletis fruit flies, swordtail fish and African cichlid fish.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Two species become one in the lab
The scale of that work, though, hardly compares with today's quests to map the brains of mice and fruit flies.
Certain fruit flies fail to develop eyes, a defect that has been traced to mutations in either of two genes.
Over the next few years researchers discovered that this protein is a growth regulator in organisms from fruit flies to humans.
Dr Mar Carmena is based at the School of Biological Sciences and has been studying fruit flies for the past 25 years.
Edinburgh University is considered one of the world's leading research centres on fruit flies, or drosophila as they are more formally known.
In fact, fruit flies are so common in African mangoes that America has banned their import altogether, to protect its own orchards.
Agricultural scientists have also looked at controlling fruit flies with parasitic wasps.
America's Department of Agriculture is creating barcodes for the world's fruit flies.
Then Tulle Hazelrigg, a professor at Columbia, modified genes in fruit flies so that the proteins they make have GFP glued to them.
Most of us think of them as simply a nuisance - but for some cutting-edge scientists, fruit flies are nothing short of potential lifesavers.
The only thing that came to my mind was the old joke that time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana.
The same fundamental mechanisms of circadian rhythms first identified by the three scientists in fruit flies "also operate in other organisms, including humans, " the committee said.
What's more, later research would reveal that genes that create this kind of RNA--known as RNAi, for RNA interference--existed in plants, fruit flies and even people.
The researchers compared the active genes in infected and uninfected male fruit flies to determine which were being switched on as a result of Wolbachia infection.
The product also appears to be an effective pesticide against ants, fruit flies, weevils, locusts, and termites, and can also make wood more fire resistant, he added.
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