Scientists Study the Moments Before Dying  James Carey has spent
most of his adult life studying the mating and foraging habits
of insects, concentrating on young bugs with a zest for life.
But an accidental discovery has turned his career upside down.
Now, instead of worrying about how the Mediterranean fruit fly
procreates and stays alive, he's trying to understand how it
dies. He calls it the "biology of death," and it's an area of
research that has received scant attention over the years.
Traditionally, biology is focused on young individuals in the
prime of life, says the professor of entomology at the
University of California, Davis.  "When they get old, they're
boring and nobody cares about them," he says.  That's pretty
much what he had thought when he instructed a postgraduate
researcher from Greece, Nikos Papadopoulos, to take one project
a step further. They had been studying the mating behavior of
the Mediterranean fruit fly. The Med fly lives an average of
about 60 days, and that brief life spa