Comments

  1. azpaul3 says

    Fly lab? You mean fly death camp. You’re growing corn for your cows, right? Except this is a death farm. You’re going to feed your livestock to your army of monstrosities … alive! May Cthulhu say salty words at you!

  2. blf says

    @1, Not so much a fly death camp as a fly mill (think puppy mill). Flies being breed indiscriminately solely for the profitbenefit of that “army of monstrosities”…

  3. kevinv says

    For some reason “The Making of a Fly” tweaked a memory and i went looking for it. Here’s the story I was thinking of: 2 bots on Amazon got into a price war over the book The Making of a Fly and eventually the price increased to $23,698,655.93. So PZ can no longer say evolutionary biology doesn’t pay.

    https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/

  4. wajim says

    Nicely done (my highest praise, by the way); clear, concise, and reassuring set-up vid for the lab. Even this English major could do it now

  5. birgerjohansson says

    If you have dairy farms in the region the harvesting of flies should not be problematic.

  6. says

    I’ve got a copy of The Making of a Fly on my bookshelf right now. I’ll let you have it for a flat $23 million.

    OK, you talked me down. $20 million even.

  7. brucegee1962 says

    I hope you’re not making yourself out to be some kind of Lord over them. Hmm…sounds like a good title…

  8. seachange says

    One of those three girlflies, the one you identified to us as a scarlet, she had a dark butt. I had to pause the video and expand it to look at her front legs to make sure you weren’t funning us and that she wasn’t a boy fly. Was she just looking butch today in the lens of the microscope? The darkbutt-y thing: this a something that commonly happens?

    (My priors are: that wild flies look like wild flies for a reason, and otherwise pedagogically you wouldn’t be mentioning them. My guess is that I will get mostly a lot of wild-looking flies from any crosses, and some of each of the scarlet and brown ones)

  9. davidc1 says

    @3 Had a look at the Wired article.At the bottom there is a link to another piece called “The Pop-up Book of Phobias”.
    Could you be a lamb and have a look for me,I am a big cowardly coward.
    Don’t know what I found more disturbing,Pop Up,or Phobias.

  10. birgerjohansson says

    I recall the entity in the first Men In Black films that was a colony of creepy-crawlies masquerading as a human.
    If you check Mitch McConnell and his ilk, you will sooner and later find one of those, solving your insect needs for the rest of the season.

  11. says

    Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t recall seeing the step where anesthetized and duly inspected flies are used/transferred to students’ bottles for culture. How many flies ought to be added to each virgin (heh) subculture bottle?