Effect of Freshness of Leaves on Shining Leaf Beetle Habitat Preference Project Proposal
Tien Van, Zoe Du, Solace Asong, Cammie Edward, and Natalie Durland
This experiment investigates what types of foliage shining leaf beetles prefer by observing their behavior among varying freshness of the same type of leaves. Like the experiment with pill bugs, which investigated what degree of moisture pill bugs prefer in soil, this project focuses on animal behavior in response to different environmental conditions. Our experiment specifically investigates what degree of freshness beetles prefer in their leaves: everything about the leaves (including color, size, and species) will be constant except for their freshness. Each choice chamber will contain a different proportion of fresh leaves to dead leaves (fresh leaves being soft and green and dead leaves being crisp and brown). Rather than simply selecting between solely dead leaves or solely fresh leaves, the beetles will select among a small range of options. This increased precision will define our results to, for example, the result that beetles prefer 75% fresh leaves to 100% or 25% fresh leaves.
We predict that the shining leaf beetles will prefer chambers with either 75% fresh leaves or 100% fresh leaves because the beetles depend on the leaves for nutrition and fresher leaves contain more moisture and nutrients than dead leaves. John Hilty (2015) (3) and a writer representing the Encyclopedia of Life (2011) (4) explain in separate articles that herbivorous shining leaf beetles eat roots as a larvae and eat leaves as adults. In every stage of their life, beetles depend on plants for energy, which implies that beetles who naturally seek fresher leaves will have a higher fitness and shining leaf beetles would evolve to select for fresh leaves.
References
- Nguyen, Rosie. “Designing a Controlled Experiment.” Pill Bugs Experiment, Docuri, 20 Dec. 2016, docuri.com/download/pill-bugs-experiment_59c1ce54f581710b28635142_pdf.
How long will you run the experiment? I think it would be better to leave the beetles for several days and observe them daily rather than every 30 seconds like what we did with the pillbugs. It will give time for them to explore all the chambers and pick which one they like best. And you might want to use small amount of individuals to make it less crowded, so their choice would solely be based on the freshness of the leaves instead of space. Great idea! Good luck!
ReplyDeleteI think that will be a great idea too. Giving them a long time to pick which leaves they prefer will give us an accurate results. The pill bugs did not really settle of one side of the soil in the chamber. They kept moving around experimenting each soil. If we had given them time to to decide what they wan, I feel we would have had accurate result. Thanks for your idea. We will consider it.
DeleteI am curious as to how you obtained the leaves for use in this experiment. Depending on where the leaves were collected from and how they were processed, it is possible that you could have sources of nutrients present in the leaf supply other than the leaves themselves, which could have an effect on the beetles' preference. Did you attempt to control for this variable in any way?
ReplyDeleteThe specimen your group chose looks amazing but, I hope you were able to give them plenty of time in your trials. When we had to deal with pill bugs in lab, they were very uncooperative.
ReplyDelete