After three decades of stalking fruit flies in the wild, Therese Markow has honed her technique to a fine art. Her weapon is a long glass tube with a gauze trap in the center. "You sneak up on the flies and suck," she says. "Then you blow them out into a vial."
Most folks would just grab a flyswatter. But Markow is charged with keeping fruit flies alive and thriving—not the dozen or so that might hover over a black banana on the kitchen counter but the thousands, maybe even millions, housed at the National Drosophila Species Stock Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson. As the center's director, Markow presides over an invaluable scientific resource: a collection of some 270 species and 1,500 strains from the family Drosophilidae. Fruit flies are the preferred pet of scientists studying topics from alcohol intolerance to the origin of species. Markow's flies were culled from their native habitats around the world, and more than 1,000 orders are shipped out each year to equally far-flung laboratories. For $20 to $75 a pop, researchers can procure by express mail a sample of the living descendants of, say, one Samoaia leonensis collected from Afiamalu Road in Upolu, Western Samoa, on July 22, 1967.
