The Mating Habits of the Drosophila Melanogaster: An Ethological Study

“To be honest, bananas are a pathetic fruit.” - Andy Murray

The fly’s legs were vibrating on her forehead. Six small, orange, translucent sticks. Going up-down, up-down, up-down so fast that it felt like Camila was being massaged by an experienced masseuse, one who knew how to hit all all of the right pressure points. For a second, she closed her eyes and imagined that instead of the legs of the fly it was the deft hands of a calming woman, with a white polo shirt and her hair tied back into a ponytail, massaging Camila in a room that was filled with candles and the sound of stones being thrown into water. Camila had been to a massage parlor like that before, once, and she come out, slightly dehydrated in a calm, happy haze. Camila certainly needed to be calm. Ever since Dr. Petrov, the lab’s principal investigator, had left for his Hawaiian vacation, she had been swamped with work. There were purchase request sheets to fill out, flies to incubate and keep healthy, more grants to compete for and, on top of all that, she still had to invent tasks for the six undergraduate interns in the lab, just so that they felt like they were being useful. None of the six could really be trusted to do anything important— at the beginning of the quarter she had given them all a quiz, with some basic questions, just to measure where they were at, and the results had been appalling. The only one who could remember anything the least bit significant was Carl, the cute German intern. And even he could only remember the mating ritual, which really was the easiest thing to remember, it was so strange. Camila had always remembered it, in its entirety, since the first time she read in the “101 Insects” book she had checked out for her sixth grade school report. And Camila could barely remember anything from sixth grade. It was not hard. First, the flies would orient themselves, then the female would run away (although, since the interns couldn’t distinguish between male and female,it just as well may have been the male fruit fly) and the male would give chase, after this the tapping would begin, which was when the male fruit fly would tap his legs on the female fruit fly, and for a bit, his legs would vibrate in a rhythmic motion, up-down, up-down, up-down….

“Ew!”

Camila swatted the fly off her head, then checked to see if it was a male. Sure enough, its small, curving abdomen was black. Then she put the fly back into the glass container they held them in and walked out of the lab into the hallway.

That was another thing the interns had forgotten— new male fruit flies were prone to mistaking who was a potential mating partner, and who was a drosophilia yakuba fly or who was a pole. Or, as in her case, who was a 28 year-old post doc. The sad truth was, though, that the fly on her forehead had been the most action she had gotten in a while. So long, really, that she didn’t want to talk about the specific timeline.

It wasn’t that Camila couldn’t get a date, it was just that she didn’t really have that much time after coming home from the lab and she wasn’t really sure that she wanted one. New relationships took time and effort, or, at least, that’s what Camila thought after extensively reading articles in magazines like “Cosmopolitan” and “Vogue.” And, as long as she had the fruit flies, she was happy. Or, kind of happy. Her relationship with flies was tumultuous, changing from love to hate periodically.

She was six years old when it started. She could remember the day perfectly: the only cloud in the sky was positioned just so that it covered the sun, the cheap pink plastic slide sat melting the in the middle of the grass, and one wayward fly who was attracted to the colorful things buzzed blissfully around it. The next part was more gruesome—it involved a splat, the blood of a fly on Camila’s purple gauchos and the soft cries of a six year-old year girl as she realized the inevitability of everyone she cared for in this world dying.

Afterwards, Camila was terrified of flies. She bought a large fly swatter, (purple, to match her gauchos) and held it up menacingly up to any flies she saw. But, much like Camila’s perception of cooties and food that wasn’t pizza, things changed over time. Her house got better screen doors, it was no longer considered cute for her to bring a fly swatter with her everywhere she went, and her view of the small invertebrates softened. Maybe the flies weren’t awful so much as they were misunderstood. Finally, Camila chose to do her sixth-grade science report on flies, specifically fruit ones. And she fell in love.

Fruit flies were ideal for scientific experiments. They reproduced quickly and in large number. They were small and their life spans were exceedingly short. This is what mystified her the most. Their lives were, on average thirty days long, or better said, thirty days short. That was barely enough time to grow up, mate, reproduce and die. The poor flies didn’t have time for self-discovery or moral development or relationships or personalities. They were fixed into a cycle that seemed entirely bent on repeating itself. There wasn’t any time for this generation of drosophila melanogasters to enjoy themselves, of course, because they needed to help make the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation.

Camila couldn’t understand why they were so selfless. Did they know that they didn’t have to waste their precious time going through the mating ritual? They could go explore the universe, look at some flowers, maybe even make it all the way to the nature reserve twenty miles away and be eaten by a bird. But none of the ones she observed seemed to want to break out of this cycle. They didn’t seem to realize their potential.

Perhaps Camila could have forgiven all of this, perhaps it wasn’t all that bad. Perhaps what really bothered Camila so much about the flies, and what prompted her constant shifts from love to hate, wasn’t actually the flies themselves but how similar they were to humans.. Like flies, humans spent much of their time growing up, reaching a sexually mature age, reproducing and then raising their offspring. Even today, most people spent only a maximum of about ten to fifteen years not being either a child or a parent. Nobody seemed to realize it. People thought that because their lives were longer and they spent more time playing golf and writing haikus, that they were somehow exempt from the laws that governed the universe. That somehow, they had evolved past the instincts that had kept animals like fruit flies alive. But when she watched humans growing up on sugary sweets, mating, settling down and buying a house in the suburbs with an above ground pool in the backyard, Camila couldn’t help but see the fruit flies, doing similar things. The way Camila saw it, this is what thousands of years of natural selection had resulted in: no free will.

Maybe this is why she didn’t get any action, and she didn’t go anywhere after ten o’clock, and she always wore baggy sweatshirts with her alma mater, Johns Hopkins, emblazoned on them. She didn’t want to meet a guy because somewhere, deep in her subconscious, she didn’t want to end up like a fly.

Camila was still pacing in the hallway, thinking, when Carl, the cute intern, came in to report for his shift. At first, she didn’t see him, and he watched as she walked forcefully back and forth, mumbling to herself. Hair was slowly falling out of her ponytail, and the small tendrils of brown protein sticking up at odd ends made her look even more frazzled than usual.

“Are you feeling well?” he asked her, except, not quite like that, because he had a thick German accent.

Camila, slightly startled, looked up at him.

“Oh yeah, of course,” she said. Then, realizing how ridiculous she must look, she smiled. “Just worrying about when those shipments of bananas will get here.”

She then ran her hands over the top of her head, patting down all of the stray tendrils, and walked back to her office quickly, trying to look as collected as possible. She waited until Carl went into the lab before she went out back through the hallway in the opposite direction and to the bathroom, where she washed her face. After drying it off with some paper towels, she looked at it in the mirror.

Was it the face of someone who should be reproducing? It was hard to tell. It wasn’t all that great, anyway. Right now it was worse than usual. The coarse brown paper towels had irritated it, turning it slightly red. But even in the best of times her nose was a little bit too upturned, her eyes an uninspired color of brown and the thin lines that made her lips curved downwards, making her look sullen. Anyway, it didn’t really matter whether or not she should be reproducing, because she would never have time do it while the was working in the lab.

The experiment she was managing right was simple. Which fruits did the drosophila melanogaster larvae grow best in? So far they had tried various types of tomatoes, apples, bananas and soon enough they would try peaches and nectarines and all of the other stone fruits. Dr. Petrov liked the experiment because he thought it was something that would help a lot of future researchers. Scientists used the flies all of the time to conduct ground-breaking experiments, and if they could grow their flies as quickly as possible, then the experiments would take less time and cures for cancer or diabetes or basic genetic principles might be found more quickly. That, at least, had been the logic Dr. Petrov had used to get grants for his experiment. But Camila really didn’t care about which fruit was the best one for the larvae drosophila melanogaster to grow up in. Because examining the larvae was gross. The larvae were gross, little writhing microorganism eating monsters who spent their first few days in rotting fruit. They had to keep the fruit in the lab, and it stunk for hundreds of feet away and there wasn’t any protective gear for the noses of the scientists.

While the larvae were gross, the adult flies made it worth for Camila. She liked watching them dart around. They all looked so alive-- constantly going somewhere, doing something, waiting for something. Even when they weren’t moving anywhere they were still twitching or rearranging their wings or blinking rapidly. Their life was so sporadic and immediate and full. It seemed impossible to think that the lives of these active creatures could be so predetermined.

Camila looked at herself one last time in the mirror, and then walked back into the lab. It took a second for her eyes to take everything in. The room was a mess of half-completed experiments and rotting fruit and chemicals in poorly labelled tubs. The full-grown fruit flies were in one corner, kept in a clear glass container with a controlled climate, and the larvae were all in containers running the length of the room, kept under extra bright light. A camera recording was their every move. Off to the left, Carl was in his new white lab coat, putting the different types of fruit into various complicated chemicals, all of which had names that were approximately six word longs and impossible to pronounce. His experiment had no real purpose.

“Is your experiment going okay?” Camila asked Carl, indulging him.

Carl stopped putting the banana pieces into the sodium-methyl-doco-deca-hedrane-sulfite and turned to look over at Camila.

“Well, I’m going to head off soon. Do you think that you can close up the lab?”

“Yes. Very good,” he said, except the word ‘good’ came out more like guide.

He nodded yes, and she left for her home.

When Camila thought about it, her house looked kind of like a rotting fruit. The orange paint was faded and there were brown smudges everywhere on it, kind of like the beaten-up peaches sitting cloistered in the cabinet of the lab right now. The whole place was overripe, past its prime. Maybe she would have liked living in the house twenty or thirty years ago, when the tiles of the bathroom floor weren’t as cracked and the doors actually closed when she wanted them to. But this was the best she could afford on her salary.

After contemplating the front of her house, Camila walked through the front door, threw down her purse, and sat down in front of her television set with a microwaveable dinner and a coke. She ended up falling asleep at around nine pm, and she had just started snoring when David Attenborough’s god-like voice began narrating the mating ritual of the birds of paradise. By some strange coincidence, the mating dance of these birds was exactly in time with her snores. From the point of view of her brown leather sofa, the birds, blurs of blue and yellow on the screen, were prancing around to the surprisingly regular metronome of Camila’s snores. Snore, 1, 2, 3, 4. Move up, move down, move left, move right. Snore, 1, 2, 3, 4...

The days kept on going like this. She would wake up early in the morning and cycle on the extreme turbo cycling machine in her living room. Sweat would accumulate on her tshirt, dripping down past her legs and staining the white carpet underneath the machine yellow. If she pedalled fast enough, her breathing would speed up and her brain would be so starved for oxygen that she wouldn’t be able to think about anything but the timer at the top of the machine, the little number in blue light constantly going down from 60:00 to 59:59 to 59:58, until it finally went got down to zero and her torture was done.

“I love the bicycle machine,” she would tell her parents when they called. They had gotten it for her as a birthday present. She did like parts of it, like how it kept from thinking about anything serious. But she hated biking.

Then she would begin her long day at work. Even though Dr. Petrov had gotten back from his Maui timeshare by now, she still had to do most of the unglamorous parts of running a lab. The things the Johns Hopkins wildlife biology department’s promotional videos never told her about: the paperwork, the personnel hiring, the managing of unenthusiastic interns and colleagues who were upset about the rotting smell that was still coming from the labs.

Sometimes for lunch now, instead of eating a premade sandwich in her closet-turned-office, she would go over to the Union near the edge of campus and order orange chicken from the Panda Express there. But she still always had to get back to the lab on time to monitor the flies and make sure that the interns were earning all of the units they were getting credit for.

Things changed for other people at work. Two of the six interns graduated from college. She wrote their recommendations for graduate school. The university janitors changed the color of the paper towels they put in the bathrooms. Carl, the cute German intern, got a girlfriend. Camila could see her dropping him off at his shifts in the morning, driving a beat-up blue toyota camry and kissing Carl on the cheek before she drove away. Maybe most disturbingly, Dr. Petrov had started growing a handlebar mustache, but didn’t really seem to know how to do it correctly. It drooped down from his face, over his mouth, and got in the way of his mouth movements when he spoke out loud, slurring his speech. And while all of this was happening, the flies were acting fast. They grew up, had sex, made new flies and died, all in the time it took Camila to decide that she actually preferred the Kung Pao Chicken at Panda Express.

The experiment was coming to a close, and it looked like tomatoes were the best fruit for flies to grow in. But nothing was really changing for Camila. Flies and humans and freedom still consumed her every thought, while her weeks and days were so similar that they seemed to repeat themselves. When she was at home, she would watch nature documentaries or read scifi books where love triangles were interspersed with long explanations of how everything was possible and intergalactic fight scenes. She still went out every Friday night with her friends from college, except normally now they would go to talks at the Natural History Museum instead of out to nightclubs, like they used to do.

One night, she was on the internet, researching the genetic influence of microbes on the fruit fly and a strange advertisement came up. In red, block letters, the advertisement asked, “ARE GENES CONTROLLING US?”

Impulsively, Camila clicked away from the rather dry article she was reading. The advertisement took her to the “Stop Genes Now” website, which was apparently a not-for-profit organization specializing in helping people realize the influence of their genes and, as she might have guessed from the name, how to stop it. The about page explained everything:

Have you ever felt like your path was already chosen in life? Like, no matter what you wanted to be, or who you wanted to be, it wasn’t actually your choice? That there was always something that you had to do or say because it was in your DNA? That is how the creator of Stop Genes Now, Dr. Paul Godwin, felt, but he didn’t know why. Of course he could do anything he wanted to because had he had free will, people around had told him, because everyone does. At first, Dr. Paul listened to them. But then, after taking a solo backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and as he was perched on a cliff looking down into deep depths of the valley, a crow sang, piercing through air like an omen from heaven, and Dr. Paul Godwin realized something. The bird was not singing because it wanted to. It was singing because it had to. Because there is no free will, because something is controlling all of us:

Our genes. Our genes are controlling us. And we have the power to stop it.

Camila’s genes were controlling her. It made so much sense. It was everything she had ever wondered, or doubted, or guessed at, explained. It was why she was so fascinated with flies and humans and their similarities. It was why she was felt uncomfortable reproducing. Somewhere, deep in the back parts of her brain, she had always known this, that her genes were controlling her. Somehow, she had risen above the confines of her genes and natural laws and realized that essential truth. But she had never been able to completely describe it, or point to the source of the control, until now.

Because it wasn’t old white men, in navy business suits and expensive shoes, sitting around an oval table in a hidden room, deciding the fate of the world amid the haze of cigar smoke. And it wasn’t aliens in another dimension sending electrostatistical waves back down to earth to control everything that we did or said. It wasn’t even cockroaches living underneath our houses and in the shadows and crevices of our rooms that were darting around and producing chemicals that slowly manipulated unsuspecting humans to benefit them. It was our genes. Our genes who were sitting around the tables-- specific combinations of adenine and guanine and thymine and cytosine wrapped up in expensive mink coats and sitting in chaises by the pool, talking about how we could perpetuate them. Talking about how we would reproduce so that they would live on in the next generation, and the next generation and the next generation.

Camila knew that her professors, and Dr. Petrov, and maybe even Carl, the cute German intern, would shudder to know that she was thinking things like this. They would say that genes didn’t want anything. That were collection of molecules that had assembled randomly at some point, and kept on being perpetuated by pure chance. That there was no more reason that a coin flipped a certain way than a certain gene ended up in a surviving person. But Camila had always thought that scientists were too slow to assign blame. They wanted the world to be cold and heartless, but Camila didn’t see the world that way-- random. She saw cause and effect, desires and wants, needs and fulfillments. She saw the genes being perpetuated, and she saw that they wanted it to happen.

The last thing Camila read on the website went like this:

So how do we control ourselves, and not let our genes control us? Well, most men are out of luck, but women-- don’t worry. You can regain control of yourself and your identity in no time. How? The process is simple: get rid of your ovaries. While you can’t get rid of your genes, you can get rid of the only way you can reproduce. If you take out your ovaries then you can’t perpetuate your genes. They are done, at the end of line, so to speak, and while they might live on in other people, they aren’t living on through your children.

Why do we recommend taking out your whole ovary, instead of just tying the fallopian tubes? Because when you take out the ovary, you take out the eggs. There is no hope for them, no way for them to perpetuate themselves anymore. Most doctors won’t help you get rid of your ovaries as a form of birth control, but because Dr. Paul believes in the righteousness of the cause, he will do it at a reduced cost.

There was a picture of Dr. Paul next to this comment. He was a good-looking thirty- something man, with sleek black hair and a pair of broad-rimmed glasses, smiling. His whole effect was calming, trustworthy. He was the type of guy companies chose to put in their billboard ads, because everyone driving by would see his face, and then trust that company the way they would blindly trust him, just because his chin slanted a certain way and he had some spots on his nose. Unlike most people, though, Camila normally was worried rather than calmed when people looked this way. She thought that if they looked that trustworthy, then were compensating for something else. But right now, she was so enthralled by website she didn’t even notice it.

Feeling emotionally drained, Camila closed her computer and called one of her best friends from her college, Jessica, to check up on something.

“Hey, Camila, what’s up?” Jessica asked her when she got the call. Camila could hear the sound of people talking in the background.

“Oh, nothing much. How are you?”

“Fine…”

"Where are you right now?”

“I’m out at a restaurant with Dan.”

Dan was Jessica’s fiancee. Camila couldn’t imagine having anything like a fiancee.

“I was just wondering, well… I know this is going to sound weird, but I was wondering if you had ever considered getting your tubes tied?”

“You mean, in the future?”

“No, I mean now.”

“Of course not right now. I want to have kids.”

“Oh okay. I have to go now.”

“Ummm…. Okay.”

Camila hung up without saying goodbye.

So genes really were controlling everyone. Back in college, Camila and Jessica had always talked about how they would never, ever, ever, ever for the life of them, go through the painful experience of childbirth. But it was six years later now, and will Jessica might have fought against her genetic code for a good amount of time, all that resistance was now worthless. Jessica was lost. She had succumbed.

Camila didn’t sleep well that night. Her eyes didn’t seem to want to close. She kept on thinking that some larger than life genes would come out of her closet with clubs, and beat her up. And when she tried to reassure herself that nothing like that would ever happen, it was worse. Because the truth was that you couldn’t see your genes coming the way that you could see thugs with baseball bats. They were inside of you, closely working on your mental state. They came slowly, invisibly, and they worked in your subconscious, so that when they won, you wouldn’t even know.

The next day at work, Camila was so tired that even Dr. Petrov could tell that something was off. She was stumbling through her assignments, mistaking what was what, and slurring her words.

“The notebook is on the ri… tablr,” Camila would say, pointing. “Oh, wait, no… I mean the left one.”

After this happened a couple of times, Dr. Petrov asked her if something was wrong.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she lied. “Just a little bit under the weather.”

“Okay. Take a day off if you need to, just make sure that you don’t mess anything up.”

That night, Camila couldn’t sleep again. The bookcases looked suspiciously like double helixes, the faucet in the bathroom was dripping ever so slowly, and she was terrified. So she decided something. She would take her ovaries out. Or Dr. Paul would take her ovaries out, of course she wouldn’t take her ovaries, because how could she do…

It only took a couple of minutes for Camila to fall asleep after that soothing thought.

She called the number on the “Stop Genes Now” website the next morning. The secretary told her that Dr. Paul’s offices were located in Southern Florida, but that there was so much demand for his services he was planning on coming up in the next couple of weeks and renting a space so that he could do the procedures for women in the New England area. Camila just had to put down her credit card number, and the secretary would reserve a spot in his schedule for her.

Normally, Camila would never give up her credit card number so easily. Or the security code. But there was no time to waste in being precautious. She needed her ovaries out of her body now. Camila gave the secretary her numbers, put the phone down and smiled. Soon enough, these leeching eggs inside of her would be outside of her, and her genes would be out of luck.

Two weeks later, Camila walked through the weathered wooden door that separated Dr. Paul’s office from the strip mall around it. There was no permanent sign marking it as his office, someone had just written his name in sharpie on a piece of printer paper and taped it near the top of the door.

The inside of the office startled Camila. Everything in it was peeling. The paint on the edges of the walls was peeling, the “Dr. Paul” poster on the wall was peeling off of it, and the secretary that was sitting off to the side of the room was peeling a banana.

“You know,” Camila told the secretary, a twentysomething young woman with a bad sunburn on the right side of her cheek but for some reason not on the left one, “bananas are one of the best environments for fruit fly larvae to grow in.”

The secretary stopped peeling the banana.

“No, I mean, they have to be rotting…”

The secretary threw the banana in the trash. Then, in a less than cheery tone, she asked Camila whether she had an appointment.

“Oh, yes, I do. For Dr. Paul…?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yeah. My name is Camila Kingsley, I made an appointment a couple of weeks back.”

“Sit down. Dr. Paul will see you soon.”

Camila sat down on the light blue sofa, and very soon started regretting her decision. Why did she need her ovaries out, again? Why couldn’t she just go to a normal medical center and her tubes tied? That would probably be much safer than what she was doing right now. This place, some reconverted office buildings with blinds covering the windows, didn’t look safe or sanitary enough to put a bandaid on while in it, much less safe enough for a full-blown surgery. Would she end up dying here? Maybe they were harvesting organs. Maybe one of her kidneys would be sold on the black market and end up in the body of some nameless Chinese millionaire, or Russian oligarch, or corrupt megachurch preacher… or possibly…

Dr. Paul came into the anteroom, and all of her fears dissipated. He was so calm, so collected, so… trustworthy. Those doubts were probably just a last-ditch attempt at controlling her. But she wasn’t going to succumb.

“Hey, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Dr. Paul,” he told her, smiling and extending his hand.

“It’s nice to meet you too,” Camila almost whispered. There was just something about those eyes... something about those eyes that could never lie.

“Are you sure that you want to go through with this?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

Dr. Paul took her to the backroom. It was cleared of all the furniture except a clean hospital bed and an office lamp that sat in the background. There were three other women standing in the room, in pink smocks. They were waving at her and smiling.

“Don’t worry about them,” Dr. Paul told her. “They won’t tell on us. They believe in the cause.”

Then they gave her some anesthesia and she went out.

She woke up eight hours later and found herself lying down on the light blue sofa in the anteroom. It was dark outside, and the only person still in the room was the secretary, who wa slurpee sipping at the end of a slurpee. Camila got up.

“You can go now,” the secretary told her.

So Camila left. She got a taxi home and then lay down on beige carpet in the middle of her living room floor and went to sleep.

People could see that Camila had changed after the surgery. She changed her haircut, chopping off most of it to form a bob. She stopped eating at Panda Express and instead got really interested in the new superfood restaurant downtown. She started dating again, although she didn’t want to do anything too serious yet. After all, she was making up for years of lost fun.

Once the experiment ended, she left the lab and Dr. Petrov and decided to quit being a scientist and instead to start a floral design shop in the cutesy part of downtown. Things were great. She was smiling more, she was exercising more. It was like she had been looking through the world through the lens of a somber Instagram filter and now something had changed, and now some higher being had swiped its finger across the iphone of life and the filter had changed, making everything seem more saturated and more bright.

A couple years later, Camila found out that Dr. Paul had, in his shady operation in the office on the strip mall off of 4th street, taken her ovaries and sold the eggs to a well to-do gay couple in Seattle for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Her young blonde daughter was growing up amidst the luxury and comfort of extra thread count sheets and preschools that required applications. But she didn’t even care.

Because her genes were inside of her, controlling her. And her ovaries had been controlling her even more. They had been dictating what she did, who she saw, what she wanted to do with her life. They were an always present force, and while she had been able to keep them at bay, they were like a glass half over the edge of the table-- precarious, waiting to fall-- , and it would only have been a matter of time before they did.

But Dr. Paul had saved her. Dr. Paul had taken them out of her. She was free.