Flies: Up Close and Personal

I happen to be in an AP Biology class (it's torturous, but it can be fun at times), so of course, we have to do labs. But today's lab in particular was a rather strange one, specifically, a fly lab. We had to choose what types of flies we wanted to study, so my group chose white flies and wild flies. We chose them because together they sound like Wet 'n Wild...I know, so scientific. Anyway, we looked at these flies under a microscope. Of course, they were unconscious while we worked with them. But even then, I got a little squirmish seeing so many flies in the petri dishes. I hadn't even looked at them under the microscope yet. I finally mustered up the courage to peep into the microscope, and AH!   

The flies were so huge! I admit, even though I thought it was creepy, it was incredible seeing such small organisms up close. I could see every detail, whether I wanted to or not. One of them even started to twitch, or as one of my group members said, "It's twerking!" Fun times.

So what did we do with the flies after? Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your attitude towards flies) we had to euthanize the parent groups. I was assigned the awful task of dumping them into the alcohol. I felt like I was committing genocide. Okay, that was a little dramatic, but you know what I mean. Strangely, at home I will squash any bug I see immediately, but in this lab, I felt bad about it. Somehow, by looking at them in the microscope and studying them, I couldn't kill them.

Someone else ended up doing it for me, so luckily I was not the Hitler of the flies today. I did have to make food for our remaining flies though so they could breed, or as out teacher eloquently put it: "They've got work to do." Oh dear.