Saturday, August 13, 2011

For my experiment I was investigating whether the pill bugs would prefer a damp environment with living grass or an environment with dead molded grass. In order to test this I had to create each of these environments inside a testing tray. On both sides of the dish I placed a wet coffee filter and then placed dead grass on one side and then the living grass on the other. We released the pill bugs in the center of the tray and began timing. Every three minutes we counted the amount of pill bugs on each side. We continued doing this until 18 minutes had elapsed. Throughout the entire experiment it was obvious that the bugs preferred that dead molded grass as opposed to the living fresh grass. From the beginning of the time to the 9-minute marking there were 5 pill bugs in the dead grass and 3 in the living grass.  After that it remained split into 6 in the dead grass and 2 in the living grass until the 18 minute marking at which there were divided back into 5 in the dead grass and 3 in the living. Though these results seem to be rather convincing that pill bugs prefer dead molded grass you must also take into consideration the outside factors. For example, these bugs could have very well been extremely stressed out due to being contained in this area and having prior to the experiment been removed from an environment in which it was comfortable and then being trapped in a small container for several hours. Also there had to be some human interference due to the fact that the pill bugs were constantly trying to escape. We constantly had to push the bugs back into the testing tray. Despite these flaws the results were what I expected. Because I had found the pill bugs in an environment that had damp molded grass it would only make sense that they would prefer this environment.

1 comment:

  1. Nice summary. You explained your setup and experiment very well. Why do you think the pillbugs would rather be in the moist, dead-leaf environment? Next post, I would like to see your data table and a graph if applicable.

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