Project:

How does the Luxury Effect Impact Drosophilae Species Variation?

Students:

Ollie Veyts, Numa Barbato-Taormina, Lily Kaplan

Institution:

Lehman College,

Mentors:

Sebastian Rojas Villa

Abstract:

Biodiversity of species has been a popular topic of study throughout ecological history, with many of these studies focusing on aspects such as geography and climate (Leong et al., 2018). However, socioeconomics is a topic of interest that may have just as much of an impact on the distribution of species in an area. Studies have found that in areas with higher income, such as cities, there was higher plant diversity; in contrast, those with lower incomes had the opposite results (Hope et al., 2003). The study coined the term "luxury effect" to describe the pattern of varying species diversity in different socioeconomic regions. While the luxury effect has been studied in terms of diversity within an order, we wondered how it would resonate with diversity within a family. For the purpose of our research, we decided to use Drosophilidae as our research model, a species commonly used in research because of their disease similarity to humans and easy breeding, though we will not be using t

Poster:

Team samples: