mealworm experiment

[lychas]

i am in year 12 biology in australia and i have just got permission 2 do an experiment on the growth rate of mealworms, can anyone give me some tips on how to do it, should i use baby meal worms or get larger ones and see how long it takes for them to turn into beetles, i'm going 2 have them at different temps 2 see what is the optimal temp.

John

 

[Mat]

Hi

How you set up your experiment depends on what you want to find out - the design of the experiment is just as important as doing the actual measuring.

If you wanted to see how fast larvae develop I would start off with small larvae or eggs - there is more of the larval life cycle ahead of them and your results may be better (ie you are more likely to see any differences in growth rates) more easily if you run the experiment over a longer time period.

Probably the best way would be to seive out some small larvae from an established colony and select only very small ones (say less than 5 mm) for your replicates, or just take out all the active larvae and assume that there are some eggs in the substrate that will hatch. This should be easy to test - seive some substrate clean, keep it separate & see if you get larvae hatching.

Once you have your larvae sorted then you can rear them up under different conditions and see how long it takes before you find pupae - these are very easy to spot. Make sure you have plenty of larvae in each batch just in case a few die off - 5 is too few, 10 just about the minimum but 50 would be much better - more statistically reliable.

Once you get the pupae I would remove to a different container so you can monitor them more easily. You could either continue with the same temperature regimes you used with the larvae or, if you wanted to produce some more interesting results, you could swap half of your pupae into the other temperature regime. This would allow you to investigate whether it was the either the temperature at which the larvae were reared or the temp at which the pupae were kept at that had the most influence on the time spent as a pupa, and would not involve too much extra effoet in terms of monitoring.

Hope this helps

Regards

Matt

 

[intrepidus6]

If you don't mind, after you are done with the expirement, it would be nice if you could post the results here, so that all the mealworm breeders here could benifit from your study.

 

[lychas]

we only have 3 weeks for the experiment so i was thinking of getting pupae and cing how long it takes them 2 change into beetles

 

[Stylopidae]

I did an experiment with mealworms and amounts of egg laying awhile back.

See if you can dig it up. Nobody replied to it if I remember correctly