The experiment.

"What happens when food is left on the ground?" That is the question that I posed to Eli when we were thinking of a Science Fair project for him. Being well trained, Eli confidently declared "The ants come out and clean it all up". This then prompted some follow up questions for us to ponder, like "do ants like everything equally?" and "are the same ants everywhere?". Since neither of us really new the answers to these questions, we set about designing an experiment to find out. The plan was to see who came to clean up when we left ham, a chocolate biscuit and some pear out for them. To see if the same ants did the same thing everywhere, we decided to run the experiment three times, once in our front yard, once at school and once in the forest behind our house.

We ran the experiment at home first - here are some photos of our set up - with roughly equivalent amounts of ham, biscuit and pear placed out on our front lawn. We stepped back to watch what would happen and then recorded what we found every 10 minutes for a bit of an hour. Eli and I both kept records - his were quite a bit more artistic and creative than mine were!











What we learnt from our front yard was that ants just love ham! We had the occasional visitor to the biscuit (a green ant) and pear (some flies and a spider!), but the ham was constantly attacked by some very hungry looking tufted tyrant ants!

Armed with our knowledge of what happened at home, we stayed behind after school one day to run the experiment in a very different environment. We expected to see lots of ants arriving and maybe to all three foods since the daily activities of kids are likely to make the school grounds a very rich hunting ground for scavengers. What we didn't expect, was for a very hungry skink to show up! As you can see in these photos and the video, this little guy stalked his prey (the flies), but was also happy making off with ham.

 Eli continued with his colourful recording of the results and he was even keen to present his findings in a video or two as well...

Overall, we had only one species of ant (coastal brown ant) visit at school, with at least a couple present at each of the three food types on most of our recording occasions. Once again the ham was the most popular food though, with in excess of 50 ants trying to drag it back to the nest by the end of the experiment. The other difference from the test at home was the large number of flies present (including house flies and vinegar flies) and these were very much to the liking of our friendly little skink.

The final test was deep in the bushland behind our house. Here we expected to find more diversity in the ants that showed up and once again we saw a different mix of species arrive to feast on our ham! These ants were by far the largest and the most colourful of any we had seen and even though they didn't come in large numbers, it was great to watch them. That being said, we did have some late arrivals in large numbers and there were quite a few flies around too - not the same ones as at school though.

Now all that remains is a bit of work for Eli and I to turn all of our data into a poster for the Science Fair. Fortunately we have quite a bit of time before that needs to happen, but stay tuned for a Science Fair post in a few months time.