From fruit fly pressure to athletes’ choices, 10 summer studies received $5,000 grants

By Dan Linehan

MANKATO — Minnesota State University professors are preparing to share their studies with their respective fields, and this summer’s offering includes a look into how track athletes pick colleges and whether fruit flies respond to peer pressure.

They’re just a few of the 10 research grants awarded by MSU’s College of Graduate Studies & Research for $5,000 each.

Put me in, coach!
Jon Lim, with the college’s sports management program, examined how Division II track and field athletes choose which college to attend.

Past research has shown the success of college athletic teams can boost merchandise and promotional profits, sponsorships, revenues from television coverage, enrollment and philanthropic giving, Lim wrote.

So as colleges seek to create winning teams it’s become important to understand why top athletes select one school over another. It would be valuable information for administrators, recruiters and coaches.

Lim got a chance to survey athletes from around the country last year when MSU hosted the NCAA Division II track and field championship. A total of 320 athletes from 72 schools agreed to participate in the survey.

Along with graduate assistant Lisa Paulson, Lim asked the athletes to rank, with one being the lowest and five the highest, a set of 11 college choice factors.

The five most significant factors, along with the average ranking of each, are: the opportunity to compete (4.3), head coach and coaching staff (3.92), athletic scholarships (3.72), degree programs offered (3.64) and team atmosphere (3.47).

Lim hopes to finish writing up the study this summer and submit it to the International Journal of Sport Management.

Flies of a feather fly together?
Biology professor Daniel Toma’s ongoing experiment measures the behavior of fruit flies genetically bred to navigate a vertical maze by either going up (away from gravity) or down (toward gravity).

He used fruit fly genetic lines started in the 1950s by Jerry Hirsch, a longtime professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Toma received his Ph.D.

Hirsch bred flies that behaved certain ways together, and eventually created entire lines of flies that reliably navigated a maze in similar ways. His work essentially created the field that is today known as behavior genetics.

“He was the first person to prove scientifically a genetic basis for behavior,” Toma said.

Fruit flies, which breed quickly and easily, have remained the organism most commonly used in these studies.

Hirsch used large groups of fruit flies, but Toma’s study examines the behavior of individual flies.

He’s looking to see whether there’s a social effect among the fruit flies.

Put another way: “Is the group simply constituted on the basis of all the individuals doing the same thing or is there something unique about the group?”

To find out, Toma and his undergraduate assistants compared individual behavior with collective behavior.

For example, that might mean mixing 10 “high” flies with 1 “low” fly. Will the fly that previously tended to walk toward gravity decide to follow its brethren?

Hirsch showed he could breed flies that flocked in groups in different directions, but will those results hold for individual flies?

The study isn’t finished so he doesn’t yet know the answer to that question.

Toma’s work is entirely theoretical; it has no bearing on human social effects, he said.