Fruit Flies Like a Banana… or Maybe a Bacardi

The best Marx Brothers line ever?

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

It turns out that male fruit flies are a lot like men — when their advances are rejected by females, they’ll seek comfort by getting drunk. So say researchers from UC-San Francisco who study reward pathways in the brain and addiction. The results don’t surprise me; I’m just trying to imagine what a fruit fly’s pick-up line sounds like…

What’s a nice gal like you doing in a rotten banana like this?

You have the most beautiful red eyes.

Is that fermented apple cider you’re wearing?

I used to have a shirt where a fly is sitting on a pile of feces at a bar. Next to her is another pile of feces, and a male fly asks her, “Excuse me… is this stool taken?” It was from a lab company that analyzed fecal samples.

And of course…

What do you get when you cross a tsetse fly and a mountain climber?
Nothing. You can’t cross a vector and a scalar.