The effect of light exposure on Drosophila melanogaster survival

Abstract

The purpose of our study was to observe how exposure to light affects the survival of adult Drosophila melanogaster. We exposed groups of adult D. melanogaster to three different treatments: constant light (24L), constant darkness (24D), and a circadian cycle of 6 hours light and 18 hours darkness (6L18D). Our data showed no significant difference between the numbers of D. melanogaster still alive in each of the three treatments after 16 days, although the 24L treatment did experience earlier mortality than the other two treatments. The final counts for the 24L, 6L18D and 24D treatments were 1.8±0.7, 2.6±1.2 and 2.6±0.5 individuals respectively. Based on our results we were unable to reject our null hypothesis that stated the survival of D. melanogaster decreases or is not affected by a decreased exposure to light. Although our research did not generate any significant differences among the treatments, our experiment yields useful information on how to set up future research on the survival of D. melanogaster.