And this is one of the great things about fruit flies.

In the New World, leishmaniasis is spread by sand flies of the genus Lutzomyia in the Old World, the disease is spread by sandflies of the genus Phlebotomus .

While Tarek commented Oh shit, we are not filthy flies for God's sake.

Some species, such as deer flies and the Australian March flies, are known for being extremely noisy during flight, though clegs, for example, fly quietly and bite with little warning.

The various species of Tabanidae range from medium sized to very large in size.

The Egyptian SandMonkey wrote a post about it entitled boys are flies, girls are lollipops.

And raise your hand if you think that basic research on fruit flies has anything to do with understanding mental illness in humans.

So slowly I began to realize that what started out as a rather playful attempt to try to annoy fruit flies might actually have some relevance to a human psychiatric disorder.

One scientific study said that simply having clover growing nearby cut the odds of cabbage root flies hitting the right plant from 36 to 7 .

Now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model, we constructed a simple one dimensional world for our favorite subject, fruit flies.

So we built a device, which we call a puff o mat, in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away.

So we decided to use our puff o mat and our automated tracking software to screen through hundreds of lines of mutant fruit flies to see if we could find any that showed abnormal responses to the air puffs.

There are repositories where you can just pick up the phone and order hundreds of vials of flies of different mutants and screen them in your assay and then find out what gene is affected in the mutation.

Research published in 2004, by a team at the University of Athens, had a reduction in reproductive capacity in fruit flies exposed to 6 minutes of 900 MHz pulsed radiation for five days.