Male Fruit Flies Get Tipsy and the Ladies Come Running

Fruit flies—they're just like us. Meaning, booze seems to boost sexytime for the pesky insect that hovers around fermented drinks and alcohol-producing rotting fruit, but perhaps not for the most obvious reason. According to new research published last week in the Science Advances journal, female members of the Drosophila melanogaster species aren't attracted more to their male counterparts because their own alcohol intake lowers inhibitions, gives them beer goggles, or otherwise draws the two parties together. Instead, when alcohol is added to the food that male fruit flies eat, they produce and emit "chemical sex signals" called pheromones, making them more attractive to females and boosting chances that they're going to get busy, reports the BBC.

For their study, the researchers set 15 fruit flies loose in a system of tiny individual wind tunnels known as the "Flywalk," where the flies were set up to walk freely as they were blasted with either pulses of clean air or with air tinged with either ethanol or methanol, both forms of alcohol, per the study. The flies clearly preferred the alcoholic pulses and would move toward them in the tunnels. The scientists also wanted to see what would happen if the male fruit flies were able to feast upon fermenting fruit—and found that those specimens "significantly outperformed their competition in copulation success," the competition being fed a "standard laboratory diet" as the control group.

Past research suggested that fruit flies may have sucked up alcohol-infused food and drink because they had an addiction, or due to feeling blue after being rejected for mating. But "we don't think flies drink alcohol because they are depressed," the Max Planck Institute's Bill Hansson tells the BBC. Instead, they're apparently doing so to gain a reproductive advantage. Another perk enjoyed by fruit flies: They apparently have neural circuitry in their brains that keep them from getting too intoxicated. Therefore, study lead author Ian Keesey adds in the release, actual people shouldn't start overindulging in the hard stuff just to attract women, as a) humans aren't fruit flies, and b) "the success of drunken male humans with females is likely to be questionable." (More discoveries stories.)