A day in the life of Fly Boy

In case you're wondering what a normal day is like for a fly biologist, we’ve decided to give you a glimpse into that wonderful world.
So when you boil it down, all biological research questions are about 1 of 2 things: sex or death. Ben’s research is about how food/nutrition affects these 2 things in Queensland fruit flies (which are way different from the fruit flies you’re probably thinking of, but we’ll save that for another day). So here’s an uber-simplified look at what he does.
These days, he devotes a lot of his time to designing the ideal maggot diet – fun, huh?!? So first, he weighs out lots of different chemicals to create different mixtures of protein and sugar.

Then he adds it to agar to create a nice firm gel in little petri dishes. Then he adds eggs to each dish so they’ll be able to start eating as soon as they hatch. In human terms, it’s like living in a swimming pool full of jello. There’s a little larva circled in the bottom left side of the photo.

Each day he checks his little larvae to see who’s alive on what diets, how much they’ve eaten (you can measure their feeding tunnels), how much they’ve grown, and how soon they pupate.

And by the end of the day, he’s a little bug-eyed!