Listening to Morayo’s chalk talk about her project gave me a new perspective on how one’s social environment affects one. More specifically, her project focuses on Drosophila, or the common fruit fly, and she is looking to see how changes in the social environment impact their courtship behavior. Previous studies have shown the effects of social isolation on fruit flies—essentially, flies housed alone have different eating and courting behavior than group-housed flies. This suggests that the social environment has significant control over behavior. I will love to learn more about why this phenomenon occurs and if the changes are reversible or permanent.
The methods of Morayo’s experiment are appropriate for her research question. She will be using different indexes (copulation index and courtship index) to get data, and she makes sure to include time as a factor that influences the courting behavior of Drosophila to figure out the optimal time to record the flies’ behavior.
I appreciated how she also made an effort to mention her future directions by talking about how she hopes to investigate why these behavioral differences between single-housed and group-housed flies are present.
