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Post by Laura Sirot on Mar 29, 2016 21:12:29 GMT
We will be testing the hypothesis that roaches use information from conspecifics to make foraging decisions. Please use this thread to post your ideas and questions about what we need to know about the roaches before designing the experiment and about the experimental design itself.
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Post by carrieleigh on Mar 29, 2016 22:15:40 GMT
I think that it might be a good idea to stick with the olfactory cues idea with the cockroaches but maybe do something similar to the 1983 Galef and Wigmore paper. By that I mean that we could have two scents that the cockroaches do not exhibit any difference in preference towards and expose one roach to food with one of the smells. Then we let that roach interact with a second cockroach and see if the second roach shows any preference for the scent that was fed to the first cockroach. We could also separate them physically but with a barrier that allows for smell transfer like in the Galef and Wigmore paper if we want to be sure that they are only relying on the olfactory cues. It might be interesting to test whether the roaches are able to sense that another cockroach has had a negative response to a scent (like became ill/was artificially knocked out but not killed) and were able to avoid that scent in the future. Although since we are putting two roaches together, we should probably consider only using one sex to control for possible courtship/mating pheromone interactions.
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Post by Kelsey Coyne on Mar 30, 2016 18:35:40 GMT
Adding on Carrie's ideas, perhaps we should use male cockroaches instead of female, and see how that affects our results. Or, we could study the reaction males have to female odors described in the Janzen article?
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Post by Laura Sirot on Mar 30, 2016 19:18:18 GMT
Thanks for your posts, Carrie and Kelsey. I like these ideas. I was thinking that we would use the Galef and Wigmore 1983 paper on Information Transfer in Rats as a model for our study. Galef has done a nice series of studies in rats about information transfer and it would be interesting and important to see if these same processes occur in other animals. So, let's keep going in this direction of thought. Can you think of how exactly we would set things up in a roach experiment? Whatever you come up with, we could try out in lab on Thursday.
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Post by charlesangelastro on Mar 31, 2016 0:58:25 GMT
At the risk of sounding like a moron, why don't we just make a simple maze of some kind (card board and duct tape) with a few 90 degree turns in it and some food at the end. We release a roach into it and time how long it takes to find the food, then take it out and put it in with another roach for fifteen minutes or so, then time how long the novel roach takes to complete the maze and if it follows a scent trail like ants and other social insects do?
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Post by Ivy Nguyen on Mar 31, 2016 1:05:50 GMT
I think it is a good idea to use male cockroaches only but how could we determine what smells the cockroaches do not exhibit any preferences over? What could we use for our control? (Maybe water?). I think we should have one cockroach have access to food they would normally eat and then have contact with another cockroach between a barrier so, as Carrie said, we could be sure that they were using olfactory cues. Then, we should let one cockroach have access to something that would be negative for them (to an ethical extent) and do the same procedure as before for that. We should also separate the cockroaches after a specific time of interaction to 1) see if the potential learning cockroach can remember what to avoid and what to eat without the aid of the first cockroach there and 2) to control for outside variables like how one pair could communicate information faster than another pair. Also, since they are so sensitive, we should not be noticeably in sight to them during the experiment because they might not do anything with us as a distraction (we could crouch behind our lab tables and observe from there).
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Post by Ashley Padilla on Mar 31, 2016 1:10:05 GMT
I feel that with Ivy's idea, we would have to acclimate the bug to whatever food source we use for a couple days and then have them not fed for a few hours, like Dr. Sirot had them when we observed them on Tuesday. Would we be using a glass barrier and a wire like barrier like the paper did? If so, we should see how the roaches react to these barriers tomorrow.
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Post by Sydney Virgin on Mar 31, 2016 1:19:37 GMT
I agree with Ivy, I think these are ideas that are realistic and a small maze type with mesh/type of fencing to reach other cockroach seems to be obtainable plus simple to create. I agree that the olfactory cues would be the most beneficial in our creation of this experiment, maybe a type of fruit could be the test food. An acclimation period is essential, as Ivy stated, they seemed to be very sensitive to us, we could maybe discuss the possibility of recording them so we don't miss a behavior or have a live feed so there is not a lot of commotion in the single room.
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Post by Laura Sirot on Mar 31, 2016 1:43:09 GMT
We might want to use the flavors vanilla and mint as they did in the other roach study you read. This approach would be similar to the cocoa and cinnamon that were used in the rat paper.
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Post by linneajohnson on Mar 31, 2016 2:31:05 GMT
Although it is impossible to completely replicate the cockroaches' natural surroundings in the lab, I think we should try our best to mimic the microhabitat conditions described in the Schal article about natural history. The closer our experimental conditions are to those that this species would experience in the wild, more accurately our results will represent the behaviors found in a true population. Since the adults and nymphs both spend their days hiding in crevices within the tree, perhaps we could add pieces of bark to the enclosures in which they acclimate. When we construct the mazes, we could place a layer of moist soil on the floor of the container and (possibly) make the barriers within the maze out of bark, in order prevent a change in surroundings from impacting the individual's food choice. Making the animals' surroundings more similar to their natural habitat will not only help us control for confounding variables, but it will hopefully also reduce their stress and thus make the study more ethically sound.
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Post by Emma Schroeter on Mar 31, 2016 3:20:28 GMT
I agree with everything that has been said so far, but I think before we get too far into planning the environments, etc. we need to determine exactly what data we are looking to record. Do we want to use the same approach as Galef and Wigmore or do we want to take a slightly different approach like Charles mentioned? Does anyone have any input or strong opinions regarding this?
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Post by Jamie Downey on Mar 31, 2016 3:20:40 GMT
I think using vanilla and menthol scents would be beneficial, or at least use something very similar to them. I also agree with Ivy that the roaches need to be acclimated to the environment since they are so sensitive. Finally I think Linnea had a good idea about mimicking the roaches' microhabitat. In the Balderrama study they use dark cardboard to cover the floor, but we could use the "dark" soil to make their testing area more natural. I think we should also try to conduct this experiment in places with different levels of darkness to see how that affects their behavior (make their environment as dark as possible).
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Post by Maxwell Clement on Mar 31, 2016 3:21:28 GMT
Going off of what Charles was saying, I think this experiment would be fairly extensive but might hold some pretty neat behaviors that we could observe. Along with the maze we could incorporate Carrie's suggested experiment as well. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we have some time with these roaches and I think this is doable.
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Post by Selina Yossef on Mar 31, 2016 3:23:33 GMT
In the Natural History article, it describes the hierarchy present in the roaches- could we possibly study how hierarchical differences affect how quickly and therefore, boldly, the cockroaches are when approaching the food source? Also how good they are about staying away from toxic food. There have been studies on baboons that have shown that baboons higher in the hierarchy have less stress and therefore have more neurons and evidently make seemingly smarter decisions. With this in mind, I am wondering if we can find a significant difference in the reactions of the subordinate and higher ranking cockroaches.
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Post by Sarah Comstock on Mar 31, 2016 3:43:44 GMT
I like Selina's idea about the hierarchy, but how would we test what place in the hierarchy the roaches fall into? It says in the article that higher-ranking males are more aggressive so we could include time to observe each male's interactions with other male roaches, and then rank their aggressiveness. Also, since in the article it says that females disrupt the hierarchy, we would need to wash and refill the mazes with new soil after each run so that females' scents don't skew male behavior.
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