Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's buzzing around out there somewhere.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, uh, and this is short stuff. Like I
Speaker 1: think I said, yeah, the seats fly something that if
Speaker 1: if you took high school biology, you talked about these
Speaker 1: little fellows, the what fly, the CTS fly. I thought
Speaker 1: we were talking about fruit flies. Isn't that the CTS fly?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Is that different? Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1: I always thought that CTS fly was the same thing
Speaker 1: as the fruit fly. Now no, because I think the
Speaker 1: tt C fly is that how you say it? Um
Speaker 1: gives like passes around dangai fever. Oh well, just never mind, then, everybody,
Speaker 1: what we're really talking about is the fruit fly a
Speaker 1: k a. The dress off ala. And it's impossible to
Speaker 1: read this next word without reading it like like this, Uh,
Speaker 1: Melano gangster, But it's not gangster, unfortunately, it's Milano Gaster. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Most people call him Josaphila though. Oh I've always heard
Speaker 1: droop now, oh man, I don't know now that you
Speaker 1: say that. I've never heard it out loud. I've always
Speaker 1: seen it in writing. So when you said most people
Speaker 1: say it that way, you just lied. So what I
Speaker 1: mean is, oh my gosh, yeah, I totally just did.
Speaker 1: Thank you for calling me out for that, just in
Speaker 1: the lying machine, apparently because I didn't realize that they're
Speaker 1: Milano gangsters no matter what. Okay, so we're talking, let's
Speaker 1: just call him fruit flies. How about that flies? But
Speaker 1: there is a bunch and by the way, t flies
Speaker 1: are large biting fly, so there's definitely not these. Um.
Speaker 1: Now we have to do a short stuff on those guys.
Speaker 1: Thanks Chuck. Literally, uh, probably one eighth of the show
Speaker 1: is now misinformation. So, um, fruit flies specifically, how did
Speaker 1: you say it? Drosophila That's what I said. It's much
Speaker 1: more beautiful than what I said, so I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: with that too. You know, most people say Drosophila um.
Speaker 1: Those particular kinds of fruit flies, Drosophila melang Melana gaster.
Speaker 1: They are um widely used in scientific experiments, and it
Speaker 1: turns out it's a lot of people know that we
Speaker 1: use fruit flies and experiments. They've actually bestowed a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of information to us humans um through their biology,
Speaker 1: through their genetics, through the very the very the very existence.
Speaker 1: We owe a great debt to them scientifically because a
Speaker 1: lot of them have been asked to sacrifice their lives
Speaker 1: in the for the furtherance of human knowledge. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of reasons, which we're gonna get to
Speaker 1: kind of here and there in a sec But you
Speaker 1: dug up this kind of interesting bit from February v
Speaker 1: two rocket full to the brim, well not full to
Speaker 1: the brim, but a lot of fruit flies were loaded
Speaker 1: up on this thing, traveled sixty seven miles up into
Speaker 1: the air, which is technically uh an altitude, which is
Speaker 1: one mile into actual space according to NASA. And they
Speaker 1: were the very first animals to go into space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they actually survived that trip um and not one
Speaker 1: of like they were the first animal and they were
Speaker 1: they were like a test animal to see. Scientists were like, well,
Speaker 1: no one's ever been to space. We have no idea
Speaker 1: what happens out there. Maybe these things are gonna come
Speaker 1: back all mutated and everything. And when they didn't, when
Speaker 1: they actually survived the flight and the re entry um,
Speaker 1: they said, oh, well, let's start sending more larger animals
Speaker 1: up and they did, and eventually we ended up on
Speaker 1: humans and that's what we're sending up these days. That's right.
Speaker 1: But it was very instructive to see those flies come
Speaker 1: back without you know, seven eyeballs or or twice the
Speaker 1: size or ten times the size they were. They were fine,
Speaker 1: they didn't hulk out. Yeah. And by that yeah, no
Speaker 1: purple ripped pants to be found. Um by that time bye.
Speaker 1: They had actually been used in biological studies for well
Speaker 1: over a decade UM. In the nineteen thirties, in particular,
Speaker 1: they basically helped establish the field of modern genetics. UM.
Speaker 1: A guy uh named um Morgan Thomas Hunt Morgan basically
Speaker 1: showed that inheritance has passed along via chromosomes using a
Speaker 1: fruit fly study, and he did it in months rather
Speaker 1: than years that his other fellow early geneticists took to
Speaker 1: to prove their studies and actually end up winning a
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize for it. And in fact, at least five
Speaker 1: people have won Nobel Prizes from directly working with fruit flies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you want a Nobel prize, not a
Speaker 1: bad place to start, that's right, Uh. And the reason why,
Speaker 1: or maybe we should take a break and then talk
Speaker 1: about some of the reasons why, right, after this. Yes,
Speaker 1: all right. The reasons why fruit flies are really great
Speaker 1: are multifold. One of the reasons if you're going to
Speaker 1: study genetics, what you need to study is generations, and
Speaker 1: fruit flies are really quick. They can create a new
Speaker 1: generation in about two weeks, so that means you can
Speaker 1: study generation after generation in short order. Uh. They are
Speaker 1: very easy to breed in the lab. Um, they're small,
Speaker 1: they don't put up much of a fussy, easy to
Speaker 1: care for. Yeah, they just want a little cornstarch and
Speaker 1: sugar soup and they're happy. Yeah little fruit maybe yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't even have to give them fruit. That's really
Speaker 1: corn Starch and sugar soup is fine with them. But yeah, ultimately,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they prefer the real deal, you know. But
Speaker 1: if they're being raised in a lab their entire life
Speaker 1: and countless generations that they of their lineage before them
Speaker 1: have been raised in a lab, they'll take the corn
Speaker 1: starch and sugar soup if that's all they can get. Right.
Speaker 1: But why, why, my friend, if you're going to study
Speaker 1: human genetics, would would you even bother looking at a
Speaker 1: fruit fly? Well that's a great question, Chuck, And the
Speaker 1: answer to it is that we share a surprising number
Speaker 1: of genes with fruit flies. Um. Apparently eight thousand of
Speaker 1: our twenty thousand to twenty five thousand genes are analogous
Speaker 1: to fruit fly genes. Yeah, so if you study those
Speaker 1: genes and fruit flies, you can extrapolate to humans. You know,
Speaker 1: what they do, what happens when you poke them with
Speaker 1: a whatever, Um, what happens if you shine a light
Speaker 1: on them, if you're doing an optogenetic study. Um. That
Speaker 1: there's a lot of questions that we've answered through genetics
Speaker 1: because of that benefit of having similar genes. And apparently
Speaker 1: sev of the genes known to cause diseases in humans
Speaker 1: are are are shared between humans and fruit flies too.
Speaker 1: It's so cool. Another cool thing you can do if
Speaker 1: you want to say, oh, I don't know, Like, what
Speaker 1: if you live in the Arctic and you're always or
Speaker 1: the greater northern climates of Canada and you're just basically
Speaker 1: cold all the time. What is that going to do
Speaker 1: to your gene activity in your metabolism. Well, let's put
Speaker 1: two thousand fruit flies in a in a chamber and
Speaker 1: make it super cold all the time and look at
Speaker 1: them and see what happens. You can get a large
Speaker 1: population study very very easily because these little fellas are
Speaker 1: so tiny. Yeah. They also share, in addition to genes,
Speaker 1: a lot of the same biochemical pathways that humans have
Speaker 1: to UM. One example I saw is that they don't
Speaker 1: actually get Alzheimer's, but they have all of the same
Speaker 1: pathways and and brain structures that Alzheimer's um befalls in humans.
Speaker 1: So we can study those pathways and try to treat
Speaker 1: Alzheimer's just by looking at UM these these pathways and
Speaker 1: these brain structures in fruit flies. Yeah. I also thought
Speaker 1: it was funny when you look at the downside of
Speaker 1: fruit flies. Aside from just some of the genetic components,
Speaker 1: the biggest downside, it seems like, is that their fruit
Speaker 1: flies and fruit flies are super annoying. They really are
Speaker 1: very annoying. Um there apparently what's called cosmopolitan species. So
Speaker 1: wherever humans are, they're going to be there too. And
Speaker 1: the reason why is apparently because we live in conditions
Speaker 1: that they find very suitable, like moderate temperatures that are
Speaker 1: fairly stable, and we like fruit too, and sometimes we
Speaker 1: leave our fruit out and it gets a little past ripe,
Speaker 1: and the fruit flies say thank you, sir or madam
Speaker 1: they doff their little top hat, um, click their heels
Speaker 1: together with their spats, and they go to town on
Speaker 1: that juicy banana, which I guess if you have a
Speaker 1: juicy banana you want to throw that now. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: did you see that listener mail by the way, about
Speaker 1: the banana bread banana. Someone emailed about something you said,
Speaker 1: and I said that I think one of the big
Speaker 1: reasons too, is because they get really really sweet. Mh
Speaker 1: is why you want to use an old banana. But anyway,
Speaker 1: the fruit flies love all that stuff. So if you
Speaker 1: live near a dumpster, unfortunately for you, which I did
Speaker 1: in my apartment in Los Angeles, had a dumpster behind
Speaker 1: my apartment, which is where I found my cat Luran,
Speaker 1: by the way, it wasn't all that Or if you compost,
Speaker 1: God help you. Um it's a great thing to do.
Speaker 1: But you're going to be dealing with some fruit flies,
Speaker 1: you are. And again, I mean, there's really not a
Speaker 1: lot besides annoyance that fruit flies vide humans like. They
Speaker 1: don't transfer or transmit communicable diseases and not a disease vector.
Speaker 1: And on the on the flip side of that, they've
Speaker 1: actually stood in as models for um disease carrying insects,
Speaker 1: Like we know a lot about how mosquitoes transmit disease
Speaker 1: by studying fruit flies as models. So they basically annoy us.
Speaker 1: But they've furthered our, understanding and medicine in countless ways.
Speaker 1: And yet we're still like, yeah, but they're annoying, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Yeah, you know that's so human
Speaker 1: it is. But they're not like that rat, the c
Speaker 1: fly now dan gay fever spreading mofo uh. And apparently
Speaker 1: if you you know, if you do compost like inside
Speaker 1: and you have a even if you have a thing
Speaker 1: with the lid, they're gonna gather around. You can set
Speaker 1: up a little little vinegar jar like a canning jar
Speaker 1: with vinegar at the bottom, uh, and then a top
Speaker 1: made of plastic wrap with some holes in there, and
Speaker 1: you can trap them and even remove them safely. I
Speaker 1: think if you want, yeah, just throw them out in
Speaker 1: the yard and say, go find a juicy banana because
Speaker 1: I don't want it. Although it is true you can
Speaker 1: use those for banana bread. I forgot. Yeah, so fruit
Speaker 1: flyes ahoy. The next time you see a fruit fly,
Speaker 1: don't swat at it, say thank you fruit fly. Your
Speaker 1: kind has been very beneficent to my kind and I
Speaker 1: appreciate it. That's right and said since Chuck said that's
Speaker 1: right and tapped his watch, Short Stuff is out. Stuff
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