Quote Originally Posted by tattlife2001 View Post
Ok results are in and I had 1326 clutches that were from female spiders and the total eggs from female spiders were.................................. 7956 that is an average of 6 eggs to a clutch...

I had a lot more males so to make it more fair I took a chart and wrote down all th females and how many eggs laid..... then took and matched things up... So say this chutch had 5 eggs in it froma female spider i found a clutch that had 5 eggs from a male spider.... I did not look at the outcome of each clutch until I had the exact numbers of eggs and clutches done and then I took and added up spiders produced the males and spiders produced by the females....

So who is ready for the results?????????


From male spiders bred to normal females the total number of spiders produced in 1326 clutches of eggs with a total count of 7956 eggs was 3291 spiders................41.36%

From a male normal bred to a female spider the total number of spiders produced in 1326 clutches of eggs with a total count of 7956 eggs was 5264 spiders....................66.16%

So I have concluded that from these results and the data I recieved the spider gene is more dominant in females and is more likely to be passed to offspring than it is from a male...

Thank you all for your help. Now to find out if this is actually true or just the clutches I had for reference so I am going to start a massive spider project.

There is a lot wrong with this. First. Its not about being fair. You have two separate experiments running. If it was one experiment then your percentages would equal 100%. So lets look at them as two separate things.

Male spider bred to Female normal. You said that the actual numbers were 45%, not sure why you felt the need to leave out data, but lets look at that. So what you are saying is that when you add that missing data in you go from 41.36% to about 45% So thats a 3% gain. So assuming the amount of eggs you left out was smaller than what you kept in the data you kept out must have been much closer to 50/50.

Female spiders bred to male normals. 66.61%, there are two possible explanations. One is a statistical bias that would even out if you increased your sample size. The other is a genetic explanation. So whats your hypothesis for a genetic explanation.

Rule number one of a good experiment is never throw out data. You show all your data and then create hypothesis for why there are variations from what was expected. Your focusing on the results you are trying to prove which in my opinion are just wrong, and because of that focus you are missing out on possible discoveries. Look at the data you collected as a whole and see what its telling you then look closer and try and see what its hiding.