Where do fruit midges come from in the house?

Each of us knows firsthand that ifleave a couple of fruits on the table for the night and safely forget to put them in the refrigerator, then they will come - horrible fruit midges. Even if it’s winter in the courtyard, the windows of your house are tightly closed, the fruits you bought the day before were thoroughly washed, and it would seem that these annoying creatures could not be taken from nowhere, as if fruit flies materialize from the air. So where do they really come from?

Fruit midges or Drosophila have accompanied humans for many thousands of years

Where do gnats come from?

In the Middle Ages, it was believed that animals andinsects can appear spontaneously, literally from inanimate matter. So, the famous Dutch doctor of the 15th century, Jan Baptist Van Helmont, argued that he saw with his own eyes how the process of nucleation of mice in a pot with wheat flour and dirty rags takes place.

Van Helmont’s idea was so popular thatremained the only theory of the origin of biological life right up to the 19th century, when the famous French biologist Louis Pasteur conducted an experiment proving that absolutely all living things can appear only from their own kind. In order to conduct a historical experiment, Pasteur placed carefully boiled chicken broth in a flask, which was immediately sealed. As one would expect, as a result of such an experiment, no life was “born” in the flask. In other words, without knowing it, Louis Pasteur (well, or his soup) became the founder of modern genetics, namely, the principle of heredity.

Louis Pasteur - the founder of microbiology and genetics

Well, it was thanks to the discovery of Louis Pasteurtoday we can confidently say that Drosophila flies do not appear from the air. Puppies appear in your kitchen when the fruits or vegetables located there gradually begin to deteriorate due to the rotting process of the plant tissue. The fact is that, mating, Drosophila lay their eggs on the surface of the fruit or vegetable they found, where the larvae of flies invisible to the human eye are waiting for their cherished hour. As soon as the process of fermentation or decay inside the fetus begins, fruit flies are activated and begin to systematically capture the territory of the fruit, and then your kitchen.

You will be wondering: Why are edible insects healthier than a glass of orange juice?

Despite its extremely small size, Drosophila managed to visit space

Drosophila just love to eat differenttypes of plant matter left after your dinner. Despite the fact that midges are considered vegetarians, they are not at all averse to temporarily changing their diet and refreshing themselves with the remains of animal food. Perhaps, precisely because of their incredible stability, Drosophila became the first insects to test space flights in history.

But this is already a good achievement for such a tiny creature.

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