In an older post  I tried to replicate an experiment published recently in “Ancient Anxiety Pathways Influence Drosophila Defense Behaviors“. My results showed a very tiny effect of the Diazepam treatment, so I decided to create a smaller arena, which was more similar to the size they worked with in the paper. I used a single well of a 24 well plate, which had a diameter of 16mm and a height of 7mm.

(D = Diazepam; nD = no Diazepam)

In the diagrams above (17 flies of each) I only included moving flies in the analysis, because some flies barely moved during the hole experiment, which had a huge influence in the results of centrophobism moving. The difference can be seen in the graphs below, which represents 10 tested flies of each group, which was only a part of the hole setup, where i also included the flies, which didn’t move.

The smaller size of the arena resulted in a smaller transition plot, which was too tiny to be analyzed. Therefore we had to set the diameter back to the original size of the arena in the Buridan, which was 115 mm, to get the following diagrams.

In the transition plots (17 flies of each) it didn’t change anything, if we left out the flies, which didn’t move, or not. Nevertheless they clearly show, that the flies without Diazepam seemed to avoid the center, while diazepam treated flies didn’t.