New Year with New Challenges: Inbreeding of lyoni spiders...

 For the past 8 months, inbreeding of my spider culture has been really tough as many individuals started to exhibit depression in each generation. Up to now, the 5th generation of inbred has successfully been obtained though I had to repeat three times for one line in order to get the fertilized egg culture. The hatching process was performed at controlled condition but still the hatching rate was relatively low compared to the previous inbred generations..A study by Bilde et al. (2007) stated that inbreeding in spiders influences a dramatic depression after the 3rd inbred generation. What they observed actually happened in my spider culture starting from the 4th gen..Gosh, in the 5th gen, only 16 out of 63 embryos were managed to hatch!..I guess these are the fittest among their siblings to thrive during inbreeding..Thank god I can still proceed to the next targeted generation...From now on, I have to take care of them with love so that they can grow up to adulthood...

                      You can spot the black dots on far right of the container.. those are the fittest...