The Progress of the Wasp Project as of 4/2/2010

Well, it's the end of the 8th week, and almost all of the data has been collected. If all goes according to plan, then Dr. Hunter is going to help us analyze the results of the research and finally figure out whether bacterial symbionts in the genus Wolbachia cause cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) in Eretmocerus emiratus wasps.
CI is a mating incompatibility between wasps of differing infection status; when a male wasp infected with Wolbachia mates with an uninfected female, he sabotages the her reproduction, since Wolbachia-infected sperm can't make offspring with uninfected eggs. Because the wasps have a haplo-diploid sex-determination system, the sabotaged female can still make males (they have the haploid number of chromosomes). Basically, to prove that CI occurred, we're comparing the amounts of eggs laid versus female wasps emerged for each leaf disk. If there were many eggs laid, but few or no females emerged in testcrosses between W+ males and W- females, then CI occurred.
Our experiment was carried out over four intense weeks (although there were a couple of weeks of planning beforehand), and 80 female wasps were examined. After the dead and unmated wasps in this group were discarded, we were left with approximately 16 wasps per block of experiments, and there were four blocks (A through D) in total. We recorded our results on a spreadsheet, and so far, have gotten some odd ones. We haven't taken a good, long look at the results, yet, but so far, some of the W+ male--W- female crosses have yielded unexpected results. Although CI was expected to occur in all of these matings, there were surprising amounts of female progeny produced. What does this mean? Well, I guess we'll see when we analyze the data and test the wasps' DNA through PCR.
Hopefully these odd results will lead to the discovery of something new that will rock the field of host-symbiont interactions for years to come. We're going to do some more mating experiments next week, and I'll definitely start putting our results into paper-form soon enough.