Week 6-Experimental design

This experiment was designed to examine which of the treatments were more attractant to insects with respect the weather conditions at York University grassland. There were 3 sets; each had all four treatments (water, sugar, salt, and perfume). The stations were placed randomly, where the first set was placed where the T.A. stopped at. The second station was placed 8 meters to the right of the first station and the third was 8 meters to the right of the second station. All the treatments were dissolved with water at 5% concentration, but the perfume was 10 buffs on the grass bundle. Each grass bundle treatment was placed on white sheet. The stations were about 2 meter square with additional 50cm of human free zoon to eliminate disturbance. Insects’ abundance was collected every 20 minutes from each set for every treatment allowing the researchers to obtain 3 trials on 20 minutes intervals. Thus, in 120 minutes, there were 18 replicated trials collected for each treatment. The same experiment was conducted on another day; the only change was that the sheets of paper were changed from white to brown and the weather condition. On day “1” there were showers, gentle breeze (7-9 mph), with 12°C temperature. Further, day “2” was sunny and the soil was lightly wet with temperature 15°C. Day “1” was 15/10/2014 while day “2” was on 22/10/2014 and the experiments timing was 3:00pm-4:45pm for both days. The limitation for this experiment was the used paper sheets, they may alternate the readings since the white or brown color may alternate in insects’ attention. Thus, that may violate the data collection from the both days. Further, the change in weather condition between day “1” and day “2” as rain may reduce the number of flying insects and heat may alternate insects’ behaviour from looking for food to looking for water. Thus, to overcome those limitations, the weather conditions need to be controlled (i.e. in lab experiment). Further, the experiment needs to have a uniform in terms of the color of the paper sheets used.