Drosophila Urinales

As some of you might have guessed from my post last week, we recently got back from a trip to Israel and I'll milk this for all it's worth, bloggidly speaking.

On our way out from JFK I spotted a mythical recent evolutionary development in urinal ecology.  The long-lasting symbiotic relationship urinals and urinal cakes between has been documented on this blog in the past, but in recent years urinals have developed a relationship with a rather hardy species of fly.

I spotted the elusive urinal fly (drosophila urinales) in Terminal 4 of JFK International Airport.

It seems that these flies bravely serve as targets for male homo sapiens to aim at. My theory, (which is, of course, thin on one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end) is that urinals desire to maximize their resource input from said men and are willing to share some of their bounty with the fly to improve their overall target performance. This role used to be provided solely by the urinal cakes which will undoubtedly need to evolve further to stay fit in this new ecosystem.

Here is a closeup of the now competing organisms: