Crickets

Background information: Some type of crickets need very little water and live in dry places.  They must have a dry place to live or they will get a disease and die.  Therefore you must provide a dry area at least 1cm off the ground for the cricket to go and a place for its food to stay dry.  If you think their food has gotten damp you should change it daily.

Look at the cricket before you put them in the terrarium to see what they look like.  After they are in the terrarium you don’t want to see what they look like but what they do, their behavior.

Cricket characteristics:

Observations of cricket (picture) before introducing it to a cricket habitat

 

 

 

Observations of cricket when put into a cricket habitat. List interactions of your crickets with their environmental factors and community (soil, light, water, crickets, plants, seeds…).

 

 

 

Questions:  What do crickets eat?

Equipment:  cricket house, cricket feeder, cotton roll, cricket, stick to climb on, and some soil.

Procedure:  Place a cricket in a cricket house with various types of food in the cricket feeder.  Wet the cotton roll with four drops of water and place it inside the dry house stuck to the side of the house up off the floor (use a very small amount of tape so the cricket doesn’t eat it instead of the food you provide).  Put 1 cm of dry soil on the bottom of the cricket house and insert the sticks for the cricket to climb on.  List the food quantities and record what has been eaten after 1 or 2 days.

Results:

Date started:

Food provided and amount:

Date finished:

Food eaten and amount:

What was it that the cricket ate the most?

List the top organisms eaten from the class list.

What type of food do crickets eat?

Conclusions:

How much do crickets eat?

Plan an experiment to see how much crickets eat.  If you use all different sizes of seeds it would be hard to measure how much they ate.  So limit the food to a small seed of the same kind and put enough food in the cricket houses to last each cricket four days (about 40 mustard seeds for two crickets is a good choice).  Remember what you learned about the type of environment crickets like in the last experiments.

Question:

Equipment:

Procedure:

Results:

How does the number of seeds compare to the number of crickets?

Conclusions:

Your chamber

Crickets

Seeds

Class average

Crickets

Seeds

 

Plan another experiment to find out what another organism eats.

Dr. Robert Sweetland's Notes ©