1,000 Giddy Arcana*: Fruit flies have champagne tastes

The greatest pun in the English language is attributed to Groucho Marx: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

But what fruit flies really like is champagne. That’s right—champagne. I had business recently in the lab of William & Mary biologist Matt Wawersik and the conversation turned to the genus Drosophila. Avoiding fruit-fly talk in this environment is like not talking about art in the Muscarelle Museum.

Matt Wawersik in his lab in William & Mary's Integrated Science Center. The vials on the shelves behind him hold some of the hordes of fruit flies used in his research.

Wawersik and his group study stem cell behavior and sex determination in fruit flies. Consequently, there are vials containing thousands upon thousands of the little bugs in the lab and all of them need care and feeding. They usually get apple juice, but if the fruit flies were running the place, Wawersik said, they’d order champagne every time. Moreover, if flies had noses, they would turn them up if Wawersik offered them beer.

“Beer is fermented from grain and they don’t like that as much,” he said. “Champagne’s made from grapes, of course.” He added that the effervescent quality of the bubbly may make it especially attractive.

They may like it, but Wawersik’s flies have to make do with apple juice. Champagne, in more than one sense, is wasted on fruit flies. “They don’t get drunk very easily. They seem to be able to metabolize alcohol pretty well,” Wawersik said, a quality that makes the fruit flies ideal subjects for lab studies of alcoholism and alcohol tolerance.

There is an exception to Drosophila’s ability to hold its liquor, he said. One lab mutation was discovered to be extra-susceptible to alcohol. Its name? Cheap Date.