Week 6: Predator Prey

This week we monitored a lady beetle (predator) that hadn't eaten for a while go after aphids (prey) on a soybean leaf. Functional response would be a description of the behavior and they reach a plateau after they are full and don't want to eat anymore. The variables would be how aggressive the insect is as well as how hungry they are and how big they are (the capacity they are able to take in).
My lady beetle was fairly hungry when it first started eating on the aphids. The beetle ate 6 aphids with 60 seconds of handling time making the average 10 seconds per aphid. There is some error on this due to my error of not getting the stop watch started and stopped on the exact times with the beetle.
My times were:aphid 1 - 7.84 secaphid 2 - 8.07 sec
aphid 3 - 6.04 sec (small aphid)
aphid 4 - 10.67 sec
aphid 5 - 11.88 sec
aphid 6 - 15.47 sec
I started the time when the beetle grabbed an aphid and stopped the time when the aphid was completely out of site. As we can see the more aphids that were eaten the longer it took the beetle. Other than eating the beetle would groom itself and just sit there. The beetle eating 6 aphids that quickly was pretty cool to watch.
The group part my job was to trace the insect as well as time the beetle when it was resting/grooming.Our beetle never did eat any aphids mostly just walked around the box with a few stops along the way.
Test #1 first beetle:
5min 29 seconds walking and 1 min 30 sec resting/grooming. The beetle did not spend any time eating.Test #2 second beetle:
3min 23 seconds walking and 3min and 37 sec resting/grooming. This beetle didn't spend any time eating as well.
There is some error on the times taken of the beetle's activity due to human error on the stop watch and time delay on the time between the beetle changing its activity and getting the stop watch stopped.
Both beetles took random patterns. The first one walked all around the box never going to the leaves to eat. The second beetle just stayed in one part of the box mostly standing around. I was surprise that the beetles never made it to the aphids being starved for as long as they were.

This was a good experience monitoring a hungry insect's behavior around prey for them to eat. This exercise is good to show how an insect can act out in the field to show how some move around and get to what they want to, it can help on how to manage some pests.