A model-based high throughput method for fecundity estimation in fruit fly studies

The ability to quantify fecundity is critically important to a wide range of experimental applications, particularly in widely-used model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster. However, the standard method of hand-counting eggs is time consuming and limits the feasibility of large-scale experiments. We develop a predictive model to automate the counting of eggs from images of eggs removed from the media surface and washed onto dark filter paper. A cross-validation approach demonstrates our method performs well, with a correlation between predicted and hand counted values of 0.88. We show how this method can be applied to a large data set where egg densities vary widely.