Essay about Animal Behavior Lab

Submitted By spsmartcookie
Words: 689
Pages: 3

Null Hypothesis: The crickets will show no preference between the citrus lemon oil and the water.
Alt Hypothesis: The crickets will show a preference between the citrus lemon oil and water.
Prediction: The mean of crickets in the room with the water cotton ball will significantly larger than the mean of crickets in any other of the five room containing lemon citrus oil on a confidence interval of 95% and +/- 2 SEM.

Conclusion: The motive of this lab was to test the reaction of crickets to lemon citrus oil verses the reaction of crickets to water. After observing the crickets for a thirty minute period of time, observations showed that majority amount of crickets preferred to remain in the room with a hundred percent water concentration in the cotton. Although, a few crickets were scattered within the chamber the average of crickets in the chamber with the pure water cotton ball was significantly higher than any of the other chambers which contained a lemon citrus oil. According to the chi squared math calculations the majority of the experiment rejected the null hypothesis, therefore supporting the researcher’s hypothesis, which is also known as the alternative hypothesis. At the five minute mark the calculations failed to reject the null hypothesis, though this may due to the fact that the crickets had not been able to become accustom to the smell of the lemon citrus oil. Overall, the experiment was a success due to the fact that the alt hypothesis was supported. The experiment supports the prediction that the lemon citrus oil does in fact have a significance in the reaction of the crickets. A source of error in this lab may have been not allowing the crickets to become accustomed to the testing environment before carrying out the actual experiment. This may have been problematic because this may have skewed the data at the start of the experiment. The crickets had no time to acclimate to their environment therefore introducing the lemon citrus scent to the crickets so abruptly may have caused them to behave in a different way than they should have. In the future researchers should allow the crickets to acclimate to their environment for at least a five minute time span to allow the crickets to become use to their environment. Another source of error, may the setup of the chambers while the experiment was taking place. The chamber were set up in such a way that the crickets had a choice of being able to lobby in the middle of chambers and not in a specific chamber. This may have caused the researchers to skew the data and give make an inaccurate decision as