Reflective Essay: The Fruit Flies

I’m nearly late to my lab that day. I rush up the stairs of the old brick building, laughs and conversations of the luckier students who had just gotten out of class echoing through the halls. My feet pound against the dingy linoleum, almost loud enough to drown them all out. I step into the lab room, exhale in one long woosh, and let my shoulder’s drop – the professor isn’t there yet. But the TAs are. They sweep through the aisles with strange plastic cylinders in their hands. I step foot in the chilled, sterile room and cover my shoulders with a stark white coat, glass tickling against each other in students’ arms, and the clean yet cloying scent of acetone invading my nose. I can see what’s in the containers from here.
Fruit Flies. Dozens …show more content…
I swat at the nuisance when I hear the cacophonous drone of its wings and hunt its relatives who buzz too quickly across my vision to properly see. But in a lab, we’re the closest of friends. When in lab, the fruit fly isn’t the fruit fly, but the Drosophila melanogaster. Drosophila melanogaster is an unassuming, unappealing little creature. Their bodies are so normal it is almost boring: beady red eyes and long, translucent wings. The females have a pointed, striped abdomen, while the males have a rounded one, with a solid black band at the very tip of their …show more content…
He takes them with a loose grip and drops it onto the counter with the other groups’ test subjects. The little flies began to stir. They awake and roam around their new cage, filled with what appears to be an endless supply of food. It must be heaven to them, I think.
“What do you do with the flies once the lab is over?” I ask my professor.
He shrugs. “One of the TAs will dispose of them in the waste containers, I guess. It’s not like we can reuse them.”
He walks away to help a struggling student. An image pops into the forefront of my mind: a young woman a dark curtain of hair falling past her shoulders, a tinkling laugh like glass being tapped together, and a sharp grin, asking me in a hushed, yet no less excited voice: “Do you want to hear about the rat I guillotined in lab earlier?”
At the end of the experiment, I leave the room and return into the world in which fruit flies and I are bitter enemies. At the end of the experiment, I’d learned all about how mutations pass down through generations. I’d learned how to identify a male Drosophila from a female. I’d passed the lab and passed the test with their help, like so many scientists before