Experimental Studies on the Duration of Life. VIII. The Influence Upon Duration of Life of Certain Mutant Genes of Drosophila melanogaster

INTRODUCTION IN the first part of this series Pearl and Parker (27) showed that there was a marked difference in the duration of life and in the form of the lx curve in wild type stocks of Drosophila and a synthetic quintuple mutation stock. It was also pointed out in a general way that this difference was hereditary and Mendelian. Previous to the work of Pearl and Parker (27, 32, 44, 49, 50, 61) there have been a few other studies on the duration of life of Drosophi1a. In 1911 Moenkhaus (10) made a casual reference to the fact that female flies were kept alive 153 days. In 191.3 Hyde (11) in studying fertility and sterility found two strains of Drosophila which differed greatly in their duration of life. On breeding these he found evidence that the F1 flies were longer lived than either parent race, and also found some indications that there was a segregation of long and short lived flies in the second filial generation (F2). Loeb and Northrop