One Giant Leap for Maggotkind

After placing a dozen maggots in a petri dish, Michael Wise was surprised to see that only two were still there. The rest had made a break for it, and were jumping all over his lab.

Wise, a botanist at Roanoke College, had been studying gall midges—flies that lay their eggs inside silverrod and goldenrod plants. Once the eggs hatch, the developing larvae create abnormal swellings called galls. Wise would dissect these and collect the orange, rice-size maggots within. And he noted that they’d often start jumping: out of the galls, out of his hands, out