Research Hit: Lonely Flies Eat More and Sleep Less — Just Like Humans

I find the research into fruit flies and other creatures amusing — even though I know just how important this research is — but nevertheless thinking of isolated fruit flies getting a bit podgy still tickles my imagination a little.

Fruit flies are, by the way, one of the first avenues for research into the brain and behaviour, they have simple brains, and research is not fraught with ethical difficulties of other lab animals. We actually owe a lot of our knowledge of the brain and behaviour to the humble fruit fly. Really.

This recent research, with an attention seeking headline, from Rockefeller University, led by Wanhe Li, is also insightful. It could show general mechanisms of social organisms that leads to predictable outcomes. In this research fruit flies were put into isolation. In a single test tube — and you thought lockdown was bad in your own home!