Animal Behavior Lab

Analysis:

Eyes: Yes
Legs: 14
Respire: Through gills
Sense Environment: Through Antennas they crawling over the chambers without lid
Stimuli Response: Getting touched, new environment
Male/Female Differences: No
Dominant Behavior: The bigger isopods climbed over smaller ones.

Sketch:
 Purpose: The Purpose of the experiment was to see how the isopods would react given
the choice of a wet and dry area.

Hypothesis:
If the isopods were put into a chambers where there’s a dry and wet area then the isopods
would choc ether wet area because it easier for then to breath.

Experiment 1: Wet Vs Dry

Chart:

Time W D
0.0 5 5
0.5 7 3
1.0 8 2
1.5 5 5
2.0 6 4
2.5 8 8
3.0 7 3
3.5 7 3
4.0 6 4
4.5 6 4
5.0 7 3
5.5 7 3
6.0 8 2
6.5 6 4
7.0 7 3
7.5 7 3
8.0 5 5
8.5 5 5
9.0 3 3
9.5 2 2
10 5 5
 Graph:

Wet Vs. Dry

 Experiment 2: Isopod Behaviors

Purpose: The purpose of this experiment was to determine which area the isopods would
prefer.

Hypothesis: If the isopods were put into an area given 4 options of an environment then
the isopod would prefer the grass environment.

Materials:
Shoebox (10
Tuna Sandwich Pieces (4-6)
Grass (One handful)
Timer or Clock
Pencil or marker

• Procedures:
• Use pencil or pen to marker to create lines in shoe boxes.
• Decide which areas you what to put each
• Once you decided that then you have to separated the isopods in to equal groups
• Then star the timer and stop at time minutes
• Graph result and discover whether you hypothesis was right or wrong

Behavior Champers:

Tuna Sandwich Nothing

Grass Tuna Sandwich and grass

Chart:

Time G TS B M
0.5 5 5 5 5
1 9 2 5 4
1.5 8 4 6 2
2 5 7 5 3
2.5 4 8 4 4
3 9 9 0 2
3.5 5 8 4 3
4 5 8 4 3
4.5 5 9 3 3
5 6 7 4 3
5.5 4 10 3 3
6 5 10 4 1
6.5 4 9 5 2
7 2 12 5 1
7.5 2 12 5 1
8 3 10 5 2
8.5 2 13 4 1
9 4 10 5 1
9.5 4 9 5 2
10 4 9 7 0

Graph:

Isopod preferred environment

 Conclusion:
The variables in this experiment the independent was Tuna, grass and our control

variable was nothing in one of the corners. The results of this experiment were that the

isopods tended to go to the area with the tuna. My hypothesis was totally wrong. I was

thinking that the isopods would prefer the grass because it’s familiar also it’s a food

source. But maybe because it was dry and the tuna was moist it tended to go towards it.
It’s critical that isopods are in a moist environment to live because they breathe through

their gills. They sense their environment by there antennas. With two eyes and 14 legs

they move relatively fast. There are differences between male and female isopods but I

could tell by looking at them. There’s usually a leaf like growth on the base of the

females legs. Also an adult female isopod would have a pouch on its side to carry the

eggs.

Some stimuli would be if I picked them up the isopods whey would crawl on me

also how respond to a new environment like the table. Or when the would try to crawl out

of the shoe box. Dominant behavior appeared like bigger isopods crawling over smaller

ones. Another study I would do could be to go more in depth in these generated

responses. Maybe get a bunch of the bugs in the armadillium category and see how they

would respond to each other. In the experiment all we could find out was how many were

in each area at a given time. Maybe next time we could uncover why did they choose that

specific area? Not just looking at small animals we could repeat the same experiment on

a large scale with large mammals like lions. See how the ecosystem in Africa works and

set up and experiment to see how they reacted to a certain stimulus. Errors that could

have happen in my experiment could’ve been that the tuna wasn’t just tuna it was a tuna

sandwich. Did the isopods go to that environment because of the tuna or the bread or

even both? Counting could of have been an error because grass was also one of our

variables and the grass did make it harder to see where the isopods were. If I could repeat

the same experiment I might use a more stable variable something that could hinder my

results.