🚨Breaking: Michigan Tech Researcher Made a world discovery after Finding Fruit Fly Believed to Be Extinct.

breaking discovery by Michigan Tech — a fruit fly once believed extinct has been rediscovered, with some surprising scientific implication.

 

What was found

 

Professor Thomas Werner of Michigan Technological University discovered a single specimen of Drosophila narragansett (a silver-faced fruit fly) on the Maasto Hiihto public recreation trail in Hancock, Michigan.

 

This species had not been collected in over 60 years, and many believed it extinct.

 

 

 

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How it happened

 

Werner, a genetics and developmental biology professor, was motivated by an oddity in a species‐distribution map. The map showed an “exclusion zone” for two common fruit fly species in an area just south of the Keweenaw Peninsula — zones where the flies should have been but apparently had not been found. Werner suspected the exclusion was artificial or due to under‐sampling.

 

He set banana‐baited traps as a small, informal experiment to test the hypothesis. This was not a grand field expedition but more of a local check.

 

When he retrieved the trap, he noticed something odd: one fly had a silver face — unlike its look‐alike, Drosophila athabasca, which has a dark face. On further inspection and lab work (including genetic sequencing), this specimen was confirmed to be D. narragansett.

 

 

 

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Why it matters

 

Rediscovery of an ‘extinct’ species: Scientists now know D. narragansett has persisted somewhere even though it hadn’t been documented for decades. That underscores how much we can miss in biodiversity monitoring.

 

Genetic confirmation: This specimen is the first one “completely sequenced,” confirming that what Werner found truly is D. narragansett.

 

Implications for mapping, ecology, and conservation: This shows that distribution maps need continuous updates. Gaps may be due not to species’ disappearance but to undersampling. Also, it suggests that insect species may survive in microhabitats or refugia we assume are empty.

 

Fruit flies are more than pests: Aside from ecological value, fruit flies are model organisms in genetics and developmental biology. Discoveries like this provide new material for studying evolution, genome diversity, and possibly even human disease analogues.

 

 

 

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If you like, I can pull together some quotes from Werner, pictures, or what next steps scientists plan. Do you want those?