It’s still a wild world we live in, despite organized cubbies and vacuumed floors. Sometimes you just have to look a little closer. Recently we’ve been infested with fruit flies. It feels like the Third World without the mud streets and rusty Coca-Cola signs. The flies hover around dumbly while you brush your teeth, watch TV, eat dinner, and do dishes. They like trash. They like fruit. What they like in the bathroom, I don’t want to know. You can catch them in your hand if you have ninja-quickness, but our recent attempts at traps only caught a few. Then my wife discovered a life hack that really works: soap. Take a small dish, put in some cider vinegar and a drop of dish soap. The soap breaks the surface tension so the flies can’t just rest on top of the liquid, drink until they are bloated, then buzz off and get in your face. The liquid now sucks them in like the La Brea tar pits. Take a look how many we’ve caught just in the last two days—it’s both disgusting and rewarding:
But let’s get back to brilliant nature. Look carefully at the picture above and you’ll see a tiny spider that’s spun a web over the fruit fly trap. This is an animal whose DNA needs to be passed down—it’s genius. I’m cheering it on like a plebe at a gladiatorial match. GO SPIDER!!!!!!!!!!
Writer, architect, father, husband.