Deep Look | This Freaky Fruit Fly Lays Eggs in Your Strawberries | Season 9 | Episode 8

You’ll never delight in this juicy raspberry … … if this fly gets its way.

It’s called a spotted wing drosophila  because the male has dark spots on its wings.

Common fruit flies are maddening enough, crawling  around and feeding on your overripe bananas.

Their spotted wing cousins are way worse.

They ruin blueberries, raspberries, blackberries   and strawberries at their mouth-watering  prime, before they can ever reach your kitchen.

Out in the strawberry patch, this  female spotted wing drosophila   is ready to lay some eggs.

She uses this tool,  called an ovipositor, to cut into the fruit.

Her ovipositor is long and has two rows of  teeth.

Much more impressive than the common   fruit fly, which uses a smaller, smoother  ovipositor to lay eggs on rotting fruit.

The spotted wing drosophila uses the  extra cutting power to dig a hole into   firm fruit while it’s still in the  field.

Then she pushes her egg in.

See that tiny white string she left behind?

It looks like one of the strawberry hairs,   but that’s how the egg will  breathe.

Kind of like a snorkel.

Within three days the egg  hatches into a squirmy maggot.

It makes itself at home – in  this case, in a blueberry.

The maggot transforms into a  pupa at the fruit’s surface,   where it breathes through two  star-shaped tubes called spiracles.

All this mucking about in the pulp ruins  the fruit, so it never makes it to market.

These flies cost farmers millions all around  the world.

They’re originally from East Asia.

Growers have to spray insecticides to kill them.

That’s why scientists are  introducing a less toxic option.

They’ve invited an old enemy  from Asia to take the fly down.

This parasitic wasp is even tinier than the  fly, but just as determined to lay her eggs.

Her favorite spot is inside  a fly’s growing maggot.

She can feel vibrations that lead her to a  fly maggot moving below the fruit’s surface.

She slides a thin needle into the blueberry  and injects an egg straight into a maggot.

The wasp egg hatches.

But instead of  killing the fly maggot right away,   it waits for it to plump up  and develop a hard casing.

Then the wasp maggot devours  the fly and grows into an adult.

All that’s left of the fly is its casing,  from which the triumphant wasp emerges.

It’s a boy!

You can tell by the long antennae.

Scientists have been raising  these wasps in labs in the U.S.

Soon they’ll be released into  fields across the country.

Based on their research, scientists  say the wasps will almost exclusively   target spotted wing drosophila and  the occasional common fruit fly.

The wasps can cut down the number  of flies, but only up to about half.

So, farmers will still need  to use some pesticides.

They’ll be playing a game of  whack-a-mole to prevent flies   from turning our scrumptious berries into mush.

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