An unavoidable pain point when working with fruit flies is that there is no way to store them. A fruit fly is either alive, crawling around in a glass tube eati

An unavoidable pain point when working with fruit flies is that there is no way to store them. A fruit fly is either alive, crawling around in a glass tube eating banana paste, or dead. Once it's dead, you can't do experiments on it, and you can't breed it. Fruit flies are used because it is easy to do genetics on them. Genetics means causing random mutations, selecting for something, then breeding them true to make a mutant strain, then crossbreeding, making further mutants, and doing experiments on all the results. Each of those mutant strains is part of your scientific 'capital', something you've invested in and want to extract returns from. You have to preserve it. And to preserve it, you need to transfer ('flip') flies of that strain to a fresh tube of banana paste every three weeks. For all of your strains. Without ever missing a flip. So i'm not sure that working on fruit flies is relaxing, exactly. Maybe if you can afford a technician to look after them for you!