Thursday, October 6, 2011

The nerdy fruit fly trap


What do you get when you allow over forty pounds of pears ripen so that you are able to can them?  FRUIT FLIES!  I take fruit fly antics seriously.  You think they're cute and little, but I saw one gunning for my eyes today while I was devouring a pear.  I saw its wheels turning: "If she doesn't have eyes... She won't be able to see the pear to eat it."  Well thought out, Fly.

While they seemed to decrease over the last week as I worked fairly hard to keep food sources out of the picture, today they had a population explosion, so I decided to set up a fruit fly trap.  It's simple: A jar, some fly bait (a pear core, in my case), a piece of paper rolled into a cone, and a bit of masking tape to close up the gap that the cone kept leaving.  You can see a few flies in this picture, but there are really about 20 in there.  I let them go outside right after taking the picture.

What makes this trap nerdy?  The fact that the flies must enter through a vortex of nasty looking tensor calculations.  I have no clue what's going on there... It's engineering stuff.  However, the nerdiness factor is strong.

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