Animal Behavior Lab

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Animal Behavior Lab Report THE EFFECT OF DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT ON PILLBUGS BEHAVIOR Grace Doan 09/12/2014 Biology 12 Ms. Yurman Introduction Ethology is a study of animal behavior. Factors that controlled the maximum size of a given population are biotic and abiotic. Because of this, animal will search for the environment which fits it structure and lifestyle, this also called habitable selection. Ethology involves observing behavior, interpreting and researching of different organisms. There are three types of behavior: orientation, agnostic and mating. Orientation behavior take the animal to its most favorable environment, it can be occurred in two ways: taxis and kinesis. Taxis is which an animal moves toward or away from a stimulus.…show more content…
This is probably because they live in soil and under rocks which is slightly neutral so neutral environment is closer to their habit environment. However, other groups got different result which is they chose dry condition over neutral condition. Due to the difference of neutral condition (chemotaxis), this behavior might have existed since the neutral chamber was too neutral. Moreover, some errors which have mentioned in the first experiment was occurred as well in the second experiment such as phototaxis.Therefore, they chose the dry environment instead. Overall, pillbug used their antenna in most of the activities such as choosing appropriate environment or moving around the chamber. At the very first minutes, the movement of the pillbugs was fast and kept moving between both sides as they don’t really like the new environment. At the very last minutes of the both experiments, pillbug seem to move slowly and not change their environment any more as they happy with the environments. This shown that the taxis of pillbug keep changing until they found an appropriate…show more content…
In the first experiment, we assumed that during the lab they would choose the moist environments. Contrary to what we thought, in the first experiment the pill bugs surprisingly chose the dry condition. This behavior might have existed because when not resting in the mud, the pill bugs were focused on escaping. And the light in the classroom might effects the pillbug’s selection as they preferred to live in darkness, this also called phototaxis. Another factor affecting the results is the difference of wet condition also known as chemotaxis. The pillbugs stay away from the moist environment when it is too wet and this would skew the
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