Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. For decades, scientists have been studying a South African daisy’s ...

Seán Duke is the Science and Health Editor for Newsweek, based in Dublin, Ireland. He has 25 years of experience as a science journalist, and editor with The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, RTÉ, ...

The female receives a dead insect as a gift from the male during mating. The gift provides the female with the necessary protein to produce eggs. If the male arrives empty-handed, he is rejected. With ...

Male stalk-eyed flies with longer eyestalks are more attractive to females and more intimidating to males — but males with a genetic variant that causes shorter eyestalks are fiercer fighters In stalk ...

(CN) — The next time you see a fruit fly buzzing around, remember that there’s a lot more going on in its tiny brain than meets the eye — especially when love, or at least mating, is on the line. Male ...

Sexual size differences are widespread in biology, yet the "how" behind them often remains vague. We asked a concrete question in a classic model organism: when female flies are larger than males, do ...

Male fruit flies reared in a lab are more successful at mating after an encounter with a robotic dummy designed to look like a rival male. The finding could boost efforts to control populations of the ...

Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are tremendously fond of fermented foodstuffs. Technically, it’s the yeast they crave, produced by yummy rotting fruit, but they can consume quite a lot of ...

A unique fungus survives by 'bewitching' male flies into mating with dead female flies. The longer a female fly carcass has lain and rotted, the greater the male's lust. Entomophthora muscae is a ...

With bloated bellies and hairy legs, female flies try to look bigger to get food from courting mates. But male flies, in turn, have sharpened their eyesight to call their bluff. A new study suggests ...