A Developmental Study of Recessive Lethals from Wild Populations of Drosophila melanogaster

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Two samples of D. melanogaster from wild populations and a third sample from a laboratory population were compared for their concentration of second chromosome recessive lethals, for allelism rate and for the ontogenetic distribution of lethality produced by these lethal factors. The frequency of recessive lethals from the wild population samples collected in 1959 and 1960 were 31.4% and 37.4% respectively and that of the laboratory population was 23.4%, a reduction of one-quarter from the incidence in the source population. The rates of allelism for the wild populations were .9% and 2.4%, for the laboratory population, 3.1%. A comparison of the ontogenetic distributions of lethal action of the lethals from the three samples with similar distributions of another wild population from Wisconsin and a group of spontaneous lethals showed no significant difference. It appears that the genetic variability as measured by recessive lethal frequency, allelism rate and ontogenetic distribution of lethality of the lethals, is about the same from year to year and there is no evidence in this study to indicate that natural selection acts differentially on lethals which produce their recessive lethal effects at different stages in development.