Trial Number 1!!!

Yesterday I mated my first set of eight females with their first male. There were two irradiation control treatments in which one female was mated with one sterile male. Then the fertile fertile mating was supposed to control for multiply mating a female and not letting the males go to completion. Both the 25/75 and 75/25 splits were used here. Then the more interesting sterile, fertile and fertile, sterile groups were also mated with the same splits listed above. The matings went really well. Today I plan to mate the females with their second males unless they are in the irradiation control group. I also pithed the males that were mated yesterday and put them in the freezer so that I can look at the sperm remaining in their pedipalps and try to get an idea of how much sperm the male had to begin with. So by today I will have 16 less males to feed!! Cruel, huh? But after feeding the spiders each week for 3-5 hours, you get excited when the workload is reduced!!

Statistics Refined

A couple of days ago, Dr. Christenson and I met with Dr. Corey, the psychology statistics guru. We went over the spider design and he thought that it was really sound! He suggested that we do a two way ANOVA looking at the percent of eggs that hatch into spiderlings with the predictor variables being mate order and number of intromissions. I was glad that our control for the irradiation method is adequate even if we mate one female with just one sterile male! This could mean less animals. As far as the multiple egg sacs, Dr. Corey just said to do repeated measures, which was also suggested by Mike. Anyways, I am excited to get this rolling!