For the project variability of phototaxis I started in the first experiment by determining the adequate amount of flies for the following tests. Therefor I used the Benzer paradigm and the T-Maze with five different groups of wild type Berlin flies with normal wings. I repeated them eight times with 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 flies.

Fig. 1 Different amount of flies in the Benzer

Fig. 2 Different amount of flies in the T-maze

As expected there is a very high variability in the groups with 20 flies, so that they won’t be used in the experiments. The other groups show that the distribution doesn’t change with the amount of flies, so that every group could be used for the experiments. Finally an amount of 80 flies was chosen.

Fig. 3 Proportions Benzer

Fig. 4 #flies in Benzer

Fig 5. Proportions T-maze

Fig. 6 #flies in t-maze

For the second experiment I took 8 groups of 80 flies and did with them the Benzer-paradigm. Then all the flies were recollected and tested the next day again. This was done overall for 4 Days.
For these experiments the flies were anesthetized with cold to protect them from damage caused by too much CO2.

Fig. 7 Proportion & time

The results show clearly that the proportion does not change with the time