Pill Bugs Research Paper

Roly Pollie Party; How Different Types of Music Impact Pill Bugs Behavior

In our experiment, my partner and I came up with the hypothesis that the vibrations of different kinds of music would affect the behavior of pill bugs. Pill bugs, also know as Roly Pollies, are small, black, terrestrial crustaceans, that roll up to protect themselves from predators. Pill bugs can't hear, but they can sense the vibrations from the sounds. This lead my partner and I to see how the vibrations from the sound would impact the behavior of the Roly Pollies. Our experiment required a few steps. The first step was to collect at least three pill bugs outside, which live under leaf litter, and put them into a small, plastic container. When we got inside,we took a two compartment choice chamber and put filter paper on the bottom to see the bugs more clearly. Then, we randomly selected one of the pill bugs and put it to the rightmost of the choice chamber. Then we played either classical or heavy metal music at 14 volume on an iPhone 6 for two minutes. We then repeated the process with our control group, where we had a pill bug with no music for two minutes. We decided to do a second round of the experiment, exactly the same way, with different randomly selected …show more content…
This is because of the vibrations from the sound, which the bugs think could be predators, so they try to get as far away as possible. The classical music has less vibrations, so the pill bugs don't think it's a predator. If I had to do something different in my experiment I would do a few more trials with some things different. An example of this would be trying different volumes. Where I would go with this would be to see if this experiment would have the same effects on different types of insects. In conclusion, our experiment went very well and we collected enough data to find out what we were hoping to find