Drosophila

What's the life span of a fruit fly again?  A day? 4 days?  Anyway, it's short.  I feel like I should remember this in better detail after months of study for the CLEP exam but everything I ever learned about biology escaped my sieve-like skull the moment I walked out of the testing center.

I could look it up, couldn't I? But I won't.  The point is that they were in my kitchen, just a handful of them, buzzing around some slightly overripe bananas that I moved to the refrigerator, depriving them of what I hope was their sole major food source.  I talked to them about their certain impending death (not likely from starvation; my kitchen is clean but it's not perfect.)  How long does life feel to something that small that lives for such a short time?  Assuming that it's aware of its life at all, do the minutes feel like days?   "You'll be dead by tomorrow anyway; Friday at the latest," I told the little gang's leader as I announced my decision to spare their lives. 

Curiosity and the desire not to look foolish (almost always too late in my case) drove me to look it up anyway.  Turns out that they can live for a month or more.   The stays of execution may have been too hasty.  No one knows the day or hour, right?  The little bastards could outlive me.