Faculty Sponsor: Grace McKenzie-Smith
Live Poster Session: Zoom will be added here
Maxwell Middleton
Maxwell is a rising sophomore from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. At Wesleyan, he is working in the McKenzie-Smith lab to track and analyze the locomotion of Drosophila Melanogaster to better understand their social behavior. In his spare time, he enjoys playing soccer with his friends and playing piano.
Abstract: Each Drosophila Melanogaster, or common fruit fly, has a degree of idiosyncrasy. That is, unique patterns of how an individual moves and grooms itself. The level of individuality of these insects is a significant topic of behavioral physics. Specifically, mimicry and behavioral shifts they exhibit when paired. Recent developments in machine learning techniques have allowed for markerless tracking and an increased ability to observe interacting animals. My specific hypothesis is about the mimicry of Drosophila Melanogaster. First, I plan to observe the idiosyncrasies of two individual flies over the course of three days, utilizing computational technology to convert footage into ethograms, quantifying their behavior. Next, I plan to observe the way these specimens interact. This includes not only their distances from each other, but also the specifics of said interactions. They will be observed together for three days. After observing differences between how these animals behave alone and how they behave together, the animals will once again be separated. They will be observed for seven days independently. With a large enough sample size of specimens, we will be able to compare the ways in which the flies interact with each other at large with the ways in which their behaviors shift. This will allow us to draw conclusions and model the behavior of the flies. After having been separated from each other, we believe that the two specimens will consistently, over time, return to a baseline of how they behaved before they were put together. We also expect that if this is the case, the number of interactions between them will impact the time and strength of the behaviors afterward. By observing these, we plan to better understand the significance of interactions and the capabilities of individuality of the species.
Towards-the-analysis-of-the-behavior-of-Drosophila-Melanogaster-after-and-during-dyadic-interactions