Think about how you can make young people happy: give them a puppy. I can’t afford to hand out puppies, but today is the day the students will come into my lab and I hand out fruit flies. Swarms of Drosophila! and I’ll tell them they have to feed them and take care of them and love them for the next three months. It will be a joyful afternoon for the student body.
I also have to explain sex to them, which I’m sure is going to be a total surprise to this group of 19-20 year olds.
It’s going to be an enlightening day, especially when all the men in the class look at their own elbows and realize they must be trans because they lack sex combs.
I just got back from setting up the lab in preparation for this big day. It’s like an icebox in there! Temperature regulation must be very complex in this building, because I can go from my office to the hallway to my research lab to the student lab, and the temperature can vary by 5°C in each transition. The student labs are just plain frigid — I’m going to have to send an email announcement to everyone in my class that they need to dress warm, wear a sweater, maybe bring those heating flasks you use when deer hunting or ice fishing, because jesus, at least the flies won’t try to escape their incubator.
Elbows? The elbows all look the same in the diagram. It’s the rear ends that look different. : )
#1 @ larpar
Those images chosen by PZ may or may not have been bowdlerized to omit the scandalous naughty bits, because most diagrams of sex combs on male fruit flies that I was able to find are (sometimes quite lasciviously) magnified. To the degree that they show on images of whole male fruit flies they are an elbow-darkening of teeny tininess.
I propose that the male primates in PZ’s class may just need artificial lenses to be sure, because that species does use tools.
Wear a sweater? The high in Morris today was like -11.43°C (or +11.43°F), so I hope they’d have winter coats with them.
Blasted fruit flies! My neighbours quince tree is full of them and it’s pretty much and impossible task to keep them out if my tomatoes and chillis. I have to pick them as soon as I see the fruit fly spot on them and freeze them until I have enough to make a batch of sauce (with a little extra protein). My pomegranate is friuting for the first time this season, and I’ve just discovered that they can even penetrate the thick pomegranate skin, dammit!
The neighbour refuses to remove the quince tree even though not a single quince makes it to being ripe.