Biology of Fruit Flies
Depending on the environmental conditions of your area, you probably find every year around the summer time your kitchen becomes home to large numbers of fruit flies. These tiny creatures can appear in swarms very quickly, and can prove annoying and embarrassing.
In order to control fruit fly outbreaks in your home, it is important to understand the life cycle and the feeding habits of the species. Integrated pest control has knowledge as its foundation; armed with this knowledge private individuals and pest control companies can deal with a potential problem. In this article, we will take a look at the biology of fruit flies, which can help us understand the area of prevention of infestations in particular.
Fruit fly appearance
Fruit flies are very small, only about 1/8 of an inch long. They are so small that you can’t really hear them as they fly, even in large swarms as they rise off of that pile of pears on the counter. Their larvae are even smaller, pretty much invisible to the human eye. If you do want to look at these little pests close up, you will often note that some have different eye colors than others; this is both a mark of genetics and of differing species.
Fruit fly life cycle
The life cycle of the fruit fly is primarily responsible for their use in genetic experiments over the years. First of all, it is very short; an adult fruit fly may live less than a day. They are also very prolific in this short time, with females laying 800 eggs or more. Fruit flies also require specific conditions in which to hatch, and the more ideal the conditions the shorter the incubation time within the egg; heat is the main factor here. Fruit flies prefer temperatures around 28 degrees Celsius to reach the shortest reproductive times - anything higher or lower will decrease the incubation, which will result in less visibility for the fruit fly population.
Fruit fly diet
When it comes to controlling fruit flies, the most important thing to understand is what attracts them. Fruit flies are not actually drawn to the fruit after which they are named; in fact, what attracts them is the fermenting of the fruit juices. The flies themselves don’t drink the juices, instead the females lay their eggs in them for nutrition. The fermenting factor means that fruit flies are also highly attracted to wine and vinegar as well as mushrooms and ripening vegetables; the reason this is not noted as much by humans is that we generally keep our soft vegetables refrigerated, at temperatures at which fruit flies cannot reproduce.