Setting Up for the Official Start!

Time to officially start the experiment. During this meeting, the trial box was more dry so I was able to complete my set up for the trial run. I placed one male and female inside the box. They are the grown up type (and possibly not virgins anymore). I used filter paper to serve as their food area and the poked holes on the box lid will provide them with enough air. After setting up my trial experiment, I moved onto setting up boxes for the actual experiment. For those boxes, the set up has to be the same so that the environment will act as a control instead of variable. I put in about 382.3g of dirt in every box, with each box weighing approximately 67g (without lid) and 95g (with lid) and poured in 200mL of distilled water. I also prepared labels and data tables for each of these boxes to keep track. If all goes well (especially the trial box), I will just have to put in the different experimental groups of pill bugs in the boxes and then the experiment will begin!

The trial box looks like:

The pill bug (male) on the filter paper is trying to get food!