Why I Breed Flies

Throughout the past 2 months I have been working on a project in which I breed flies. The traits of the flies I had been assigned were winged female and apterus male. To begin the project I started out with winged females to breed at least 8 virgin to then cross them with the apterus male. Apterus means to not have wings. Throughout the rest of the project I observed how an expected outcome can vary greatly from an observed outcome,
The expected outcome of this cross was to have all of the F1 generation carriers and about 25% of the F2 generation apterus. However, I did not see any apterus flies at all. This could possibly be because of error I may have had choosing out virgin females and separating them while creating the parent cross. I might’ve accidentally mixed both male and female into one vial causing some offspring to be purely winged, instead of the carriers they should’ve been. However, I feel confident I did this project correct because of how I line up with my class data.
Others who had the same or similar cross as we saw little to no apterus flies as well. I feel like the gene for apterus is just a lot more recessive than the gene of having white eyes. It seemed like those who had a cross between red and white eyes had a lot more of each gene then everyone else who had the genes for …show more content…
If they are asleep the vial should stay on it’s side and I shouldn’t have picked it up so much because I just ended up killing my flies. Another thing would be to be more accurate when separating males and females for the parent generation. A simple mess up could cause a big fracture in trying to find accurate information. Lastly, I would be less afraid of the flies. The fear caused me to over-etherize the flies sometimes because I thought small flinches would become them flying around in seconds. However, I was wrong and they just