Today, we continued progressing in our groups, and some groups started collecting data! The class started with Marshall making announcements about the soapberry and boxelder guts we sent off to the genome center. Things seem to be going well, and we expect our data to arrive around May 30th! We are excited to get the data back. With three weeks left, each group is preparing to collect as much data as possible so we can start doing some data analysis and writing our papers.
Class Schedule
Colony maintenance: Palatability group
The palatability group maintained the colonies. We collected survival data, changed feeders, and removed dead bugs. There are a lot of nymphs being raised; however, we lost quite a few colony boxes that were empty today.
These were all the empty boxes that were cleaned out today, 18 of them.
Group updates:
Wildcard group
The Wild Card team focused on dissection today for boxelder bugs (plus 1 soapberry) and data collection with sex, body length, total gut length, and gut sections (M1, M2, M3, and M4). We had some trouble with untangling the boxelder but were able to power through with the dissections. Then we prepped our guts to get cultured in a new set of petri dishes with the same set of dilutions as the soapberry bugs: 1/10, 1/100, 1/1,000, & 1/10000. However, because we only had a certain amount of petri dishes, we planned on only plating the 1/100 and 1/10,000 dilutions. We are hoping to see more and different types of bacteria for our box elder. For next time, we will continue measuring the rest of the guts, and hopefully get started on qPCRs.
Boldness group
Today the boldness group finalized an ethogram and have started to use a bird call to stimulate the bugs awareness. We started a few trials and have acquired some data. We also painted the walls to be black to avoid the insects from not being able to see the borders of the arena. We categorized out observations by look at when the insects leave the platform they are on, how they respond to the bird, if they interact with novel objects and the amount of time it take for them to reach the wall. These trials last about 5 minutes if the insect stays inside the arena the whole time and it is ended if they leave before the 5 minutes are up.
Palatability group
The palatability group started the day with colony maintenance. After that, we started researching possible methods for introducing the bugs to the ants. We created a spread cheat with all the variables we will measure in preparation for data collection on Wednesday. We also started preparing materials and gathering the tools that will be needed for data collection in the field.
Color group
We finally started collecting data! First, we went on a search for more soapberry bugs and found just enough to get started. We began doing trials to see how long it takes to mate soapberries of differing intensities of red. We painted female soapberries three different shades of red and paired them with a male in a petri dish. To our surprise, most did not mate within an hour. Next we plan to see if we can run more trials and begin our preference test!
Homework
- With only a few weeks left in the quarter, ensure you are working on your papers.
May 22nd Schedule
Comments
Post a Comment