March 5, 2012

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The Parasite That Drives Flies to Drink

By Alex Wild

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

A couple weeks ago the science media was positively tipsy with news that common fruit flies fight parasites by... wait for it... ingesting enough ethanol to kill their inner tormentors. Fruit flies boast a higher tolerance for ethanol than most other insects, including the wasps whose larvae grow by consuming young fruit flies from the inside. Flies can drink their attackers under the table, so to speak.

This sort of study is the science commentariat's perfect story: solid research on an animal familiar to most readers, easily anthropomorphized, and headlineable with any number of drinking puns. Most coverage centered on the flies, but I was curious about the parasites, figitid wasps of the species Leptopilina boulardi. I was especially interested after discovering how rarely the parasites had been photographed. So I contacted one of the study's author, Todd Schlenke, who kindly hooked me up with some of his charismatic study subjects. Below are a few photos I took of Todd's wasps this weekend.

Fruit flies are attacked by several wasps, not just the lovely Leptopilina. Here's a diapriid, Trichopria drosophilae, that attacks fly pupae rather than larvae:

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And a braconid, Asobara citri:

I hope you enjoy seeing these photos as much as I enjoyed taking them!

source: Milan NF, Kacsoh BZ, Schlenke TA. Alcohol Consumption as Self-Medication against Blood-Borne Parasites in the Fruit Fly. Current Biology Feb 16, 2012.

Alex Wild is Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books and media outlets.

More by Alex Wild

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