SCIENCE IN ACTION:

Your Mission is to discover how to tell apart new species:

In order to study these flies more thoroughly, we need to be able to tell them apart in the field. Genetic analysis can tell us if two individuals belong to distinct species, but we NEED YOUR HELP to figure out how to tell them apart based on traits of wings or behavior.

Fruit flies in the genus Blepharoneura live in cucurbit plants and are highly specialized to both host taxa and host tissue.

Some Blepharoneura species live exclusively in the male flowers, some exclusively in the female flowers, and others in the seeds. We want to know if species living on the same plant taxa or the same host tissue are more closely related.

Here are our hypotheses for which flies are most closely related: