April 20-24

All this week we focused on the cockroaches. We had to figure out what kind of experiment we were going to do. First we observed the bugs to see how they acted in this envirement and then we had to come up with an a question to test in an experiment. My group observed that the cockroaches stuck to your hand. Also when you tried to get them off it was a little hardere than expected. So our question was, "What can cockroaches stick to?" Our hypothesis was that they could stick to everything we tested them on using the suction cuo like things on their feet/legs. We tested plastic, glass, wood, cloth, computer screen, and dry erase board. We put the object at a 90 degree angle so we could see if stuck or not by it falling if it did not stick. The independant variable was the materials. The dependant variable was whether they stuck to the object or not. And the control variable was the cockroach. In the end they stuck to everything except the dry erase board. I think we did this experiment to better understand the cockroach. If we know what it could stick to maybe we can better understand what kind of nvirement it lives in. Since it stuck to the wood we can tell that there are trees in its natural envirment probably. We can also ask more questions and conduct more experiments. One question like why do they stick to things and maybe we could test thet and get more questions and experiments from that and so on.

Field Trip

On this field trip we went to camp Spears. It was very educational. I learned about bogs, lakes, and teamwork, but I'm only going to talk about the bog and the lake. At the lake we caught a frog. Then some people caught leaches. I caught some bugs and learned that they were I think stone fly larva. They were swimming and didn't know that larva could swim. At the bog I saw that the land looked like you could stand on it but as we learned from the counselers said that a kid stepped down in the bog moss. We also learned that there is a tar substance in there so it's impossible to swim. So if you fall in you couldn't get out without help. That's what happened in England where there was a man found in a bog and because of the tar it mummified him in a leatherly layer of tar stuff. He was so preserved people thought that it was a murder that might have happened 3 weeks earlier. But it turned out he was hundreds or thousands of years old. And that he was part of a sacrifice ceremony. The last thing I learned was that the bog we visited was actually the largest bog in North America!