Pill Bug Synthesis

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Determining if Pill Bugs Prefer Rotting Strawberries or Rotting Wood

Purpose and Background Pill bugs are a type of woodlice from the family Armadillidiiae that live throughout the United States. They are known for their ability to roll into a ball and are sometimes called roly-polies. Pill bugs predominantly eat rotting vegetation such as vegetables and leaves. They prefer to live in damp locations and are often found in organic garbage. Pill bugs dislike light and dryness and roll up into a ball for protection when faced with dryness, light, or predators. In their ecosystems, pill bugs are involved in biodegradation, the decomposition of organic materials. Choice chambers, boxes used to study preferred animal habitats, are often used …show more content…
We captured the pill bugs for our experiment by digging for them under rocks, as our potatoes were soaked during a rainstorm and caught no pill bugs. Initially, the pill bugs dispersed relatively evenly among the three areas of the choice chamber: wood, strawberries, and middle. However, once the pill bugs became more used to their surroundings, they moved away from the middle, toward the strawberries and wood. More pill bugs went to the strawberries than to the wood; across our three trials, 17 pill bugs moved to the strawberries or their juice and 12 moved to the wood. Some of the pill bugs that moved to the wood probably moved there because of the shadow the wood cast into the choice chamber, not because they actually preferred wood. The pill bugs tended to move toward the food and away from the empty center of the choice chamber, with only 4 pill bugs across our three trials remaining in the middle of the choice chamber. Our hypothesis was unsupported as the pill bugs moved to the strawberries instead of the wood. However, more than half of the pill bugs did move to the strawberries after 2 minutes and very few of the pill bugs remained in the middle of the choice chamber. The pill bugs probably preferred the strawberries to the wood because they were much more sugary than the
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