Day 4 cntd: Drosophila Group

Hola! Elizabeth, Kayla, and Gio here!



Our project involves examining the sex ratios of the Drosophila (fruit fly) species found here in Alamos. We were expecting the majority of our flies to be of the D. arizonae and D. melanogaster species. But SURPRISE! A large portion of our sample from the rural area was an invasive species of Drosophila-Zaprionus indianus. You never know where science will take you!

Top: Zaprionus indianus, Middle: D. melanogaster, Bottom: D. arizonae

We caught all of our flies with aspirators-some of us are better at it than others, but in total we had about 1,000 flies! If you don't know what aspirating is, we suck the flies up through tubes and then blow them back out into vials. It's pretty fun, but definitely takes some practice. After we had our flies, we dusted them with neon dust so that when we release them and recapture new sample populations we can see which ones we already captured. It's pretty cool, because they will clean themselves off so that you can't see the dust anymore unless you look at them underneath a black light.

That's all for now! We will let you know how our project turns out, and maybe get a picture of what the flies look like under the black light! In the meantime we will be hanging out in Mexico, doing science and having fun!

Elizabeth, Kayla, and Gio.