In my last post I presented results of testing Diazepam treated wingless flies in the T-Maze with a groupsize of about 50 flies, which showed nearly no effect. To see if the flies in the group tests maybe distract each other e.g. by making loud noises, I built a Single Fly T-Maze. The arms of the T-Maze have a length of 32 mm and a diameter of 6 mm. They end up in vials, which have a length of 60 mm and a diameteder of 10 mm. The fly gets blown in from below, which forces them to decide immediately (fast Phototaxis) between one side, that is lit from above, and one side, that is darkened with aluminium foil. The samplesize was 30 flies, where each fly was tested 6 times.

The Choice Index was calculated by

[(Light choices)*1 + (Dark choices)*(-1)] / (Total of choices)

1 = all flies prefer the light

-1 = all flies prefer the dark

Although the measurements are very distributed, the Boxplot shows increased Photopreference in wingless Diazepam treated flies. Testing each fly more than 6 times maybe could improve these results and decrease the high distribution.