YEAR 9 SCIENCE EDGE (BIOLOGY)
By Clare Wilson
With Grace Yap, Denae Moore and Ben Sharpe
INTRODUCTION
In this experiment we will test our Red Rust Flour beetles to find out when they become more active. We will put the bugs under two zones, a hot and a cold. After doing the test a couple of times we will be able to put our results together to come up with an answer. With knowing the bugs prefer one zone or a certain temperature we will be able to find out the natural habitats and the nature of the bug.
BACKGROUND
The common name for these beetles is the Red Rust Flour Beetle but if you want the scientific name you will find, Tribolium Castaneum. It belongs to the family, Tenebrionidae. The adult size beetle is about three to four millimetres and has an elongated body that is more or less parallel shaped. It is red brown or a dark brown in colour, this beetle is recognised because of the antennas that are inserted under the sides of the head. Also the bug forms a 3 segment club elytra with finely punctured lines. These bugs are distributed throughout the tropics and subtropics.
Red Rust Flour beetles like being in between 22 and 40°C but preferable 35°C. The female beetles will lay up to 500 eggs. The life cycle of a beetle is 20 days under the optimum temperature and environment. Larvae and adults are secondary pests and attack cereals, groundnuts, spice, cocoa, dried fruit and nuts. Infestation in commodities discolours grain and emits a foul odour. This insect does not appear in standing crops. Therefore, good hygiene with storage and control equipment should minimise infection.
AIM: To discover whether the Red Rust Flour beetles react and become more active in the warmer or cooler zones.
HYPOTHESIS: The Red Rust Fl...
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... bugs live in tropic/subtropics areas so straight away we can know that they will become more active in the warmer areas.
In both tests the results show very different things. I think the second test was a lot more successful than the first. The main factor that would have overall affected the results would have been the different temperature between the two tests. This and the fact that they were on a different day and the fact that we didn’t have the exact same amount of bugs in the containers would have been the biggest factors that would have disadvantaged our test.
CONCLUSION
I was able to prove and find out my answer, which was my hypothesis; the bugs will become more active under the lamp or in the warmer zones. Although these beetles can cause a couple of issues with grains in discolouration and odour but otherwise they cannot be harmful or called a pest.
The sowbugs remained in the damp soil for 34 minutes, and the dry soil for a short 6 minutes (Table 1). The sowbugs remained in the damp soil 85% of the time, as opposed to 15% on the dry soil (Table 1). These results suggest that moisture was a causative agent in environment preference for the sowbugs (Table 1).
..., Department of Zoology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, Available from Journal of Insect Physiology. (46 (2000) 655–661)Retrieved from http://www.units.muohio.edu/cryolab/publications/documents/IrwinLee00.pdf
To conduct the experiment, the beetles were massed, then attached to a petri dish with a 30 centimeter piece of dental floss. The beetle’s mass was the independent variable. Afterwards, the floss was tied to the beetle’s midsection with a slip knot. Then, the beetle was placed on a piece of fabric with the petri dish attached to it. As soon as the beetle was able to move with one paperclip inside the petri dish, more were added, one by one, until it could not move any further. After the beetle could not pull any more, the paperclips were massed and the results were recorded. The dependent variable was the mass that the beetles could pull. No control group was included in this experiment.
Other human errors could have affected the results, such as not inverting the plate before putting it into incubation would not allow for bacterial growth. Not pipetting the tube up and down to mix the bacteria that settled at the bottom of the tube before starting the Gram Stain would not allow for an accurate reading because there wouldn’t be many bacteria on the slide. Passing the slide over the bunsen burner too many times, hence killing the bacteria and not allowing for a Gram Stain. If this experiment had to be redone, one improvement would be to allow for more than one plate without a point deduction. Unexpected human errors might interfere with a person’s results.
5. You will be using this tutorial to help you find references for the experiment and laboratory report you will be working on during lab on pill/sow bugs (see Lab 2 Activity Two in the lab manual). List 4 specific keywords you will use when searching for literature relevant to your pill bug experiment. You should not list “Boolean” operators as keywords. Note that you often will find relevant and very useful literature with related species (not just pill/sow bugs!) (2
Also we might have been shaking the test tubes at different speed which may have caused a greater number of bubbles to be released. Overall I felt that the experiment was accurate and reliable and there was not much that could have been changed on it.
The data we gathered was tested to be as accurate as possible. Our prediction on the solvents did not support our data that we collected. The cause of this could be due to human error when washing the beets or the cutting of the beets. The beets were not perfectly cut the same size, so some beet pieces were bigger than others which can affect the final the final result. We followed each step and followed the time limits cautiously. I can say if we were to redo the experiment our results would be similar because we would attempt to do the experiment as close as we did the first
The boll weevil’s primary food source are cotton plants, a crop that covered the southern plantations at the time. In the spring, when they emerge from hibernation, they puncture the cotton buds and lay their eggs inside ("What is a Boll Weevil?"). After about four days, the larvae are born. This is where most of the damage occurs. The larvae eat and destroy the cotton fibers("What is a Boll Weevil?"). The plant is plagued by these insects; they eat them until the cotton plant’s eventual death. The boll weevil season allows for man...
fauna will start to creep out of hiding. The few summer months are used by many
Merchant, M. Insects in the City. Texas A&M Agrlife, 14 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.
I observed the Tobacco Hornworm in the morning for 2-3 minutes, as well as the evening after I had placed the hornworm under more direct light. Each day I
There are nearly one million species of insects known. Insects are defined by having six legs and a body divided into three segments: head, thorax, and abdomen. Chitin is an organic material that makes up an insects exoskeleton. There are three life cycles of insects, ametabolous or incomplete and paurometabolous or gradual, and homotabolous or complete metamorphosis. These life cycles are important in the aging of insects for aiding in legal investigations, (Houck and Siegel. Entomology).
The firefly is sometimes referred to as a “lightening bug.” There are about 2,000 firefly species; for the most part they live in warm but humid environments. Fireflies are neither flies nor bugs; they are actually part of the beetle family. Fireflies are from the Animalia kingdom, and are of the Lampyridae family. Fireflies hibernate over winter by burrowing underground, under water or settle under the bark of a tree some can live for several years by hibernating as larva during the winter.
Inconsistencies in this lab could have caused variations in data collecting. Collecting data from one petri dish was challenging because something could have been different on other petri dishes if this experiment was tested on several petri dishes. This could have been different because the other petri dishes could have had more micro-organisms in Section 2 instead of Section 1, or no bacteria could have grown at all in every section of the petri dish.- Second, nothing grew in section B even though there were no disinfectants in that section. The reason why the bacteria and mold might have grown in sections 1, 2, and 3 was because in the process of making the experiment, the coffee filter papers were touched with glove free hands and were not clean. If this lab was run again, some changes would be to wear rubber gloves, do not pour the hand sanitizers on the coffee filter paper but just pour one pump straight into the petri dish, have more than one petri dish to collect data off of, and check when the last time someone cleaned the door knob
Forestry: Insect Infestation Insect infestation is a big problem in Canada. The forestry industry directly provides jobs for over 300 000 Canadian residents and even more in indirect jobs such as making paper (“Canadian Geography,” 2006, p. 142). The loss of millions of hectares of forest to insect infestation would mean that many people would be left jobless. For instance, in British Columbia, the mountain pine beetle has already destroyed approximately 620 million cubic meters of pine trees of most species (“Environment,” 2009, p. 1). All Canadians should face the growing problem of the insect infestation’s effect on the vast Canadian forests.