Pupas and Beetles!
3 experiments later, it's midterm. I ended the second mealworm experiment after 6 days, and am feeding the mealworms normally. For the midterm I had a "show and tell" style with my results to encourage questions from the process, insect life cycle, and thoughts for moving forward. Some thoughts we had were, how can this be scaled up and maintained as a closed-loop system? What would that look like at a state/country level? What direction will I be taking this experiment? System? Installation? More breeding and experiments? Can I continue to feed them plastic and breed those offspring, would their offspring more adapted to plastic than the generation before? Can we embed packaging to make it more appealing for bugs to consume?
““The simple fact is that your experiment shows there IS HOPE for dealing with the seemingly insurmountable problem with plastic.” ”
Thank you classmates for your support and constructive feedback :)
Currently the whole setup is moved from the Nature Lab in my bedroom (yikes, but it's ok they're in bins) and they've become like pet to me. I go through the bins 3x a day to remove the pupas from the mealworms, the about-to-hatch pupas from the younger pupas, and when they hatch i put the young beetles in with the rest of the beetles. My first beetle hatched that night after my midterm, and since then I have close to 30. They should be matured and any day I should be finding eggs in the substrate along with the frass.
