Monday, December 12, 2011

Cricket behavior investigation

Question: Do crickets prefer fruits or vegetables ?

Hypothesis: I think that crickets will prefer fruits because David put apples into the cricket tanks

Background:  Crickets are omnivorous scavengers who feed on organic materials, as well as decaying plant material, fungi, and some seedling plants. Crickets eat their own dead when there are no other sources of food available, and exhibit predatorial behavior upon weakened, crippled crickets.
Crickets have relatively powerful jaws, and several species have been known to bite humans.
Crickets mate in late summer and lay their eggs in autumn. The eggs hatch in the spring and have been estimated to number as high as 200 per fertile female. Species Acheta domestica however lays eggs almost continually, with the females capable of laying at least twice a month. Female crickets have a long needle-like egg-laying organ called an ovipositor.
Crickets are popular as a live food source for carnivorous pets like frogs, lizards, tortoises, salamanders, and spiders. Feeding crickets with nutritious food in order to pass the nutrition onto animals that eat them is known as gut loading. In addition to this, the crickets are often dusted with a mineral supplement powder to ensure complete nutrition to the pet.

                                                         Experimental setup:
Data Table:

What I DID: What I did was record the data of crickets actions every 30 seconds. He just did everything pretty much everything over and over again. So i wrote out in words what he did and I also  drew an Illustration of how he was in the cage.

What I LEARNED: I learned how to record animal behavior data using pictures. I also learned that the cricket prefer the fruits because he ate apples twice for 2 minutes and never once ate the vegetable. And I also learned that the cricket would walk away before getting more food.

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