Group Progress

Today was an eventful day for our individual groups with some progressing towards experimental methods and data collection, while others continue to brainstorm and refine theirs. Survival data on our colony was completed as usual and Marshall was able to set them up with heating pads. Although, through all our progress on this project, we did have to say farewell to our antibiotic boxelder survivor, Queen Tetra.

May 10th Class Schedule

Time	Activity
9:00	Class debrief and discussion
9:10	Separate into small group projects (Boldness group does colony maintenance)
11:20	Break
11:40	Continue group work
12:30	Regroup as a class and set next meeting agenda and goals

Colony Updates

1. For todays class, the Boldness group conducted colony maintenance. They collected survival data, removed dead bugs, replaced water and respective antibiotic treatments, and replaced synthetic food.

• Random observation: Witnessed a live soapberry bug mating with a dead one

2. Our heating pads have arrived! Marshall set these up during class. Hopefully our colony eggs will take a liking to the new warmth so we can see some nymphs!

Group Updates:

Boldness Group:

After starting off with colony maintenance, our group set up a few trials for testing possible experimental designs to examine the boldness of our soapberry and boxelder bugs. In doing so, our goal was to observe how long they took before visiting novel objects of different colors. However, we found a preference for red objects in a boxelder bug, possibly rerouting our design into color preference over boldness.

Palatability Group:

Today the palatability group began the day by redirecting our experiment to a new predator, since our initial spider idea wasn’t working. We visited the bee farm to look for assassin bugs, but were unsuccessful. However we did find a jumping spider and kept it in a container with a nymph to see if it would try snacking on it. Then we went to the Putah creek environmental ecosystem to look for ants. We found a small colony but decided they were too small and few, so we left them a dead soapberry bug and proceeded. Feeling a little hopeless from our lack of ant collecting, we made our way to our last stop of the day, Oak Grove. We had a lot more success at Oak Grove with finding ants! We brought containers filled with ants back to class and put in some soapberry bugs to see what happens over the weekend. We started hatching out a plan for our methods and how we are going to proceed with our experiment for the following weeks.

Color Group:

Our color group made a considerable amount of progress on their experimental design, creating the mini studio mentioned before to generate an environment with the same white lighting. They were able to take some images of our bugs and obtain color codes.

Wildcard Group:

Today the wildcard team went out to collect bugs for dissection! We started by going to Putah creek to collect boxelder bugs. At first we had a hard time finding them and catching them, but we were able to successfully catch a sufficient amount for our dissections. We then headed to the Segundo area to collect our soapberry bugs. After collecting our bug samples we came back and labeled our containers and put them to freeze. We then discussed culturing the guts, and did some research on the types of media to use, possibly Tryptic Soy Agar(TSA).

Homework:

• None in particular but a few things to keep in mind for our next meetings:

• Have methods planned by Wednesday and aim to begin collecting data by Friday

• Notebooks from beginning of quarter will be revived

May 22nd Class Schedule

Time	Activity
9:00	Class debrief and discussion
9:15	Continue group work and set experimental methods (Colony maintenance done by one group)
11:00	Regroup as a class/update on current methods/design
11:10	Break
11:30	Continue group work
12:30	Discuss group progress and set next meeting agenda and goals (+ clean up)

Side Note:

Have a Happy Mother’s Day weekend!