As we sat with a bottle of wine and opened it yesterday, a fly came and started annoying us. It’s generally observed that flies come when you sit outside and open a bottle of beer, wine, and spirits. Of course, nobody really wants those flies — but still, they come, following the opening of a beer like Monday follows the weekend.

Sky News has recently published that now scientists have figured out how fruit flies have such a knack for magically appearing whenever a can of beer or bottle of wine is opened. The team based at the California Institute of Technology have published their results in the journal Nature — findings which have overturned earlier scientific consensus.

Their study spanned thousands of experiments conducted over a six-year period and discovered that contrary to prevailing thought, fruit flies were in fact attracted to carbon dioxide (CO₂) and not repulsed. The study was led by Dr. Floris van Breugel and resolved a paradox surrounding fruit flies’ response to CO₂ which had baffled boffins for decades. Dr van Breugel was inspired to pursue the experiment when thinking about fermentation during the course of a home brewing project.

“The scientific literature about insects broadly shows that CO₂ is a universal attractant,” said Professor Michael Dickinson, whose laboratory was used to carry out the research. “But a long series of papers claimed that fruit flies are averse to CO₂. They’re basically the only insect for which that was reported.”

At the time, an experiment in the Dickinson Lab’s wind tunnel involved mosquitoes or flies buzzing around or landing on a platform from which plumes of CO₂ were released while cameras tracked their movements. It was found that the flies had actually crawled through the tube where the CO₂ was being emitted into the wind tunnel — they just kept crawling.

During the course of the investigation, the researchers found that flies seek out CO₂ when they’re in an active state, but avoid it when they’re sleepy or moving slowly because of wind factors or hunger. The team believes this observation has resolved the contradiction between the laboratory’s results and other studies.

Dr van Breugel said the behaviour was probably the result of a balance between the reward of proximity to food sources and the risk of danger. He noted that CO₂ is produced by animals when they breathe and it attracts predators like parasitoid wasps which lay their eggs on fruit fly eggs, larvae, and adult flies. So, if a fly is going to sleep and not trying to find food, it wouldn’t want to be near a gas that is going to attract things that are trying to eat it and its babies.

Nature is full of wonders!