Mating behaviour and analysis of eye pigmentation of several mutants of Drosophila melanogaster

✍ Scribed by M. D. Ochando

• Book ID: 104635757
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1981
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 427 KB
• Volume: 55
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0016-6707
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00135105

✦ Synopsis

Mating in the dark between individuals carrying different eye color mutants extracted from the same natural population is shown to be random. (Previous experiments had shown that darker-eye males mate more successfully under alternating light-dark conditions). Extraction of pigments and quantitative analysis by absorption curves show that all mutants have less pigmentation than wild-type individuals; unexpectedly, darker-eye mutants do not resemble the wild-type level of pigmentation any more than light-eye single mutants. The results suggest that (1) eye pigmentation is not neccessarily related to visual ability; (2) some kind of pleiotropic effect affecting the central nervous system may be involved in the sexual behaviour of male mutants.