Cycle 3!

Cycle 3 is the week when baby pill bugs are being born in large numbers. Box #6 shows the most positive results in terms of closeness towards the predicted outcome. What this means is that Box #6 is the box with the longest presence of male (because it has a male all along), and its babies are born the earliest since when I discover babies in Box #6, there aren’t babies in Boxes #5, 7 or 8 yet (they are in one set of experimental trial), which supports the “male effect” exists.  All throughout this week, I am observing the babies growing and I found an interesting factor that even in Box #1 and Box #5 (where it contains female x female, supposedly my negative control group) have babies. So I left it the way it is but still found out that the babies born in Box #6 grew faster and are in bigger size than the new born ones in other boxes, proving that prolonged male existence does have an impact. Next week, cycle 4, I am going to continue observing the appearance of babies and look for babies that will be hatched in Boxes #3, 4, 7 and 8. One more week till experiment is complete!

Cycle 2!

Start of cycle 2 on April 12th and 17th for #1,5 and #2-4,6-8 respectively. Following the plan of the experiment, this is also a week without any interferece on anything. As usual, continual spraying of 10-15 sprays per time to keep the area moist. One interesting thing is because of the moist, the left-over food has been covered with fungi, most likely molds. In #8, I found a mushroom on Tuesday; I was unable to take a picture of it but it looks a flower. It won't stay but I had to remove all the filter papers for the food area as well as under the "hosue" made by egg containers. Some of the containers actually have mold on them too so they were replaced. It is mostly maintence work this week and the interference of male presence will occur next week. Meanwhile, I had to control the amount of food fed to them so to prevent mold growing on the soil and I cannot spray on the food but the soil.

Here's a picture of that fungi mushroom that grew in #8:

I just learned about fungi in my AP Biology class so it was very cool to see one;

I brought it to class and we were all fascinated!

Cycle 1!

This week is the first week of cycle 1, which is planned for everything to settle and stay in the initial setting, with no inferference except continual spraying for a moist environment and feeding. To continue on my last blog record, I sex-ed bugs to complete my set up to have 14 females and 2 males in #1-8. All of the bugs in #2-4 and #6-8 are placed in on April 10, 2012, which means cycle 2 starts on April 17th for them. With #1 and #5, they are kept the same since the start of the experiment, so despite the fact that their cycles started on April 5th, it is all right for them to stay for the four cycles. As for all other bugs, I placed the other sex-ed males in a colony tank and some of the ones are left unsex-ed in another colony because they hid under soil. However, I found some babies in that tank, they are tiny in size compare to grown pill bugs, about 2mm long and 1mm wide. Their bodies are transparent but their structures are already developed.

Here's a picture of the baby pill bug that I isolated and placed into a petri dish:

I have seen a couple more babies in the un-sexed colony tank, exciting!

Official Start of Cycles!

The bugs came in on yesterday, I placed them all in a "colony tank" and sorted them out today. Unlike last time, there are a lot more males than females, which is a big CHALLENGE because I need more females than males. I ended up only being able to start #1 and #5 with four females. For all #1-8, I sprayed 30 times because they seem to be drying out faster than I expected. Throughout this and the coming week, I will be sexing more and continue taking care of the rest of the sex-ed bugs.

Here's me looking into the microscope and waiting for them to expose their hind legs:

Fun observation: pill bugs get "impatient" under the light as they struggle to escape from it.

Sexing them takes less time now, even though it still requires about 1-2 minutes per bug.