Experimental Setup - Woohoo!!

Experimental Box Setup and Continued Bug Collection (ew)!!

Hello class! Today we got a lot done and worked really well as a team. Everyone did a fantastic job at breaking off into groups and accomplishing our class goals. After we aligned on the potential experimental design and response variables, we broke off into a group that collected more bugs and a group that stayed behind and worked on the implementation of the experimental design. Main points today included: 1) bug collection, 2) brainstorming experimental design focuses 3) Setting up the basics for the experiments and 3) collaborating effectively! 

Our class minutes:











Experimental Design Thoughts:


Potential response variables

During class:

We did a great job working together and creating the homes for our lil guys for the rest of this quarter.

So many people were a *million* times better than me with the tape and I am grateful they were- I'm pretty sure we would have lost all of the babies.

Later we had a group of 7 go around campus and collect soapberry bugs and a group of 3 go to Putah Creek to gather elderberry bugs. Here are some awesome pictures from their time in the field!


While some were in the field collecting bugs, some of us in class were making vials of water or antibiotics and the others were making the synthetic food from:

  • 350g ground peanuts
  • 350g ground green beans 
  • 50g sucrose
  • 20g ascorbic acid
  • 250g nipagin
  • 250mL water

Look at all this progress!

Pipetting water and antibiotics into vials
Synthetic food dosed out into bottle caps

Antibiotic vials!

We moved on to crushing 5 seeds per box with a seed treatment and putting the vials of water and vials of antibiotics into each container depending on the randomized assignment that was generated via sheets/excel. We also put two egg carton "cups" into each container regardless of the treatments to allow for some shelter for the younger nymphs later on. 

Cutting the egg cartons!

Boxes labelled according to bug, water/antibiotic, and food treatment
Once the bug collecting group came back we tried to put four female soapberry bugs into each soapberry container and one boxelder bug in each boxelder container until we ran out. Sadly, we will have to wait for next week to get more and we did not give any of the boxelder bugs food. We did, however, supply them with their assigned vials. Hopefully, this will not influence results drastically.  

Notes: 

Before next class, we will ideally have more balloon vine seeds ordered and boxelder bugs. This class, we did not have enough boxelder bugs to separate into each container. We also didn't have their food source so the bugs we did have, did not receive any food treatments including the synthetic or the elderberry seeds themself. Overall, we made a lot of progress and should be proud of all that we could do!

Homework:

  • R4 (due this Friday, May 3)
  • Schedule Progress Check meeting with Marshall here
    • Let him know if you do not see a time that works for you
  • Literature search both bugs ability to see in color
  • R5 if it is posted by Friday
  • Refer back to previous post detailing the boldness test we will use

Schedule for next class:






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