The effects of adaptation to urea on feeding rates and growth in Drosophila larvae

A collection of forty populations were used to study the phenotypic adaptation of Drosophila melanogaster larvae to urea laced food. A long-term goal of this research is to map genes responsible for these phenotypes. This mapping requires large numbers of populations. Thus, we studied fifteen populations subjected to direct selection for urea tolerance and five controls. In addition, we studied another twenty populations which had not been exposed to urea but were subjected to stress or demographic selection. In this study we describe the differentiation in these population for six phenotypes: (1) larval feeding rates, (2) larval viability in urea laced food, (3) larval development time in urea laced food, (4) adult starvation times, (5) adult desiccation times and (6) larval growth rates. No significant differences were observed for desiccation resistance. The demographically/stress selected populations had longer times to starvation than urea selected populations. The urea adapted pop...