Pre-Trials - Trying to get procedures set and confirming Positive and Negative Controls

 Groups are working hard to identify how they will be doing their research projects. Some groups are confirming positive controls and negative controls before they run their experiments. 

This group is seeing the ants fight for the first time.

Collecting ants for the pre-trials.

These students are trying different techniques to mark ants from different colonies.

These students are grinding up ants to extract small amounts of colony pheromones. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Ready To Travel

Image
Covid 19 has made international travel very difficult and many of us had to cancel or postpone our trips abroad. Trinity High School and Mercy Academy (both in Louisville, KY) along with Lexington Catholic (Lexington, KY) have paired together to take an amazing adventure in Costa Rica. In collaboration with Seeds of Change, these three schools will be studying leafcutter ants and conducting experiments in the rainforest. 10 days of learning in one of the most beautiful places on earth.  Students will be posting a daily blog to share their experiences and highlight their research. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts.  Trip One: May 29th - June 8th Trip Two: June 9th - 19th  Let the learning begin. 
Read more

Reflections from B. Sills

Image
 The day started with breakfast, today's was eggs and ham. After breakfast, we went to the classroom. There, Dr. Pinto and Allen explained how to dig up an ant colony. After the explanation we started on a hike to a place with a lot of colonies for us to dig up. We first saw a palm plant that had been ravaged by leafcutter ants, leaves the size of my chest were just gone, taken away by the ants. We then continued our hike, coming upon a small Atta colony. This colony was too small to excavate so we counited on. As we passed more colonies, Dr. Pinto explained the larger colonies make their own highways to improve the effectiveness of the cutters. We finally reached the field, and we split up in our groups. my group was unlucky and instead of finding a leafcutter colony, we found a fire ant colony. I was the one digging, but the ants seemed to avoid me. Joey got the worst of it, they got into his jacket. After that bad experience, we moved on and found a real leafcutter colony. It wa...
Read more

Reflections by J. Geddie

Image
6/14/22-Joey Geddie's Blog Entry                          Oropendula bird nests!!                      Can't beat a tropical waterfall pool to cool off for the day!  6/14/22-Joey Geddie's Blog Entry     After going into anaphylactic shock on Sunday, this morning was the first time I didn't feel like voiding my insides via esophagus, so off to a great start!   After having a great breakfast the consisted of the usual food with the notable introduction of sausages, the whole group went strait to the tractor where we boarded a trailer that took us to our adventure spot of the day.  We dismounted from the tractor, met our guide Joseph from Zambia, and started off our short hike to the waterfall.  While the hike was short, difficult is a great way to describe it.  Lots of mud, near 90 degree verticality, and little...
Read more