Playing with fruit flies!

BUZZZZZZZ was what i could only hear from my two test tubes of flies! yes people, i played with fruit flies, cute, small, clean and not to mention ugly under the microscope...

for the last two biology practicle lessons, we've been playing with fruit flies, observing their dominant and recessive phenotypes! so fun right? i mean, we've always been reading about white eye and wild type eye(red in colour), and we've been hearing teachers and textbooks saying that it's recessive, on the X chromosome... well, i really saw these traits! very cute! i also saw vestigal wing phenotype, and many others!

we had two tubes, each with a pair of flies whom had mated and layed many many many eggs in the banana mesh at the bottom of the tube, one tube had a white eyed male and a red eye female, the other tube had a red eye female and a white eyed male. we were taught how to differentiate male and female flies! it was so fun!

then, we "doped" the flies by forcing them through this tube with a cotton bud with chloroform.. very cool!!!!!!! and you know how we stop the flies from flying out of the tube as we remove the cap and put a passage way into another tube? ahhahahahhahah we simply had to hit the tiube to a rubber base and the flies just kept bumping down the bottom! they couldn't fly.. well, occasionally there were careless student who lest flies escape but other than that most of us succedded in doping our flies. so fun man!

then we waited till they stopped twitching, so as to make sure they were really doped! then we took them out on a glass slide and viewed them under the disecting microscope.. ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!! they looked so hairy and ugly under the microscope.. but nontheless still cute!! hahahha

unfortunately, we had to dispose of the flies after we doped them.. by dumping them into a bottle with alcohol, in which the lab staff named "fly morgue"

however, ont fly of mine got away!!!! as i was moving the galss slide with the 4 flies on it, one of them, a male, red eyed fly, droped in to a gap in the microscope, ahhaha, and we couldn't get it out, so my partner and i decided to "spare it's life!" ahahaha

after the lab session, i gentlly used my brush and and dugg it out and placed in a piece of folded paper and brought it home! i placed it in a plastic box with air holes and it lived for a while..

ahahhah, it was cute, i fed it apples and bread, but it was the shortest living pet i had ever had... it lived for 2 days... sobb....... (i know you guys are laughing now....=p)

the next week, we went back to the lab and all the eggs had hatched and grew into adults, this time we had 30+ flies a bottle to dope! it was fun!