Gnatty dread

No matter the season, something always landed in my wine. In summer it was fruit flies and in winter it was fungus gnats.

That took a little while to figure out. Plants overwintering in the breakfast nook would, by December, be home to generations of scrawny flying insects. These were not apparent on the soil but only in the air, your face or your adult beverage.

Especially attracted to fungal odors such as those of beer or wine yeast, fungus gnats constitute six of the seven families categorized in Sciaroidea. I couldn't tell whether the ones breeding in my katuk plants were the same as those...