Week 8, 9 and 10 Animal Journal Entry: Experiment Gone wrong

I saw a post on one of the forums that Roaches can live without water for only 7 days. I decided to test this for Week 8. I gave them their last meal for the week and gave them water and food after 1 week.  After 5 days there was no food on the plate and the tissue was bone dry. I noticed that  my small nymph roach had was missing. I finally found it remains amidst all the rubbish. It had sadly passed away while the rest scurried on. I noticed that some of the growing fungus had disappeared it seems that my subjects weren't picky about their food. So I decided to move the placement of food and water for  another 7 days.  At the end of 14 days an adult roach had died totally swiveled up. The rest looked thin and didn't move too much even if I moved the container they just stayed there. 

It seems that the adult roaches managed to live longer since they had stored more fat and they consumed all the fungus infested food stock in the container and this may have given them some more water during the test. There was also some condensation occurring in the container verified by the water accumulation on the inside of the plastic top cover. Perhaps they also managed to access this one.

I gave the two remaining roaches food and water and returned on week 10. They had an abudant supply of food and water. The two remaining survivors of the experiment had grown a bit plump and where moving quite quickly. 

Reading the module sections on ecology and the effect of animals in their enviroment I began to think about what the cockroach does in nature. The presence of man have caused it to congregate in sites where we store food and live in the dark places of our modern dwellings.  Makes me wonder if cockroaches followed the early humans in their caves. The roach based on my observations is not a predator it belongs to the lower sections of the food chain. It devours materials and could help the decomposition process and it may serve as food for various animals like fish, lizards and spiders. We have lots of lizards and spiders that live in our backyard and I have found roach remains in the spider webs. I believe that roaches tend to distribute spores of fungus when they move around. I've placed a roach in a container with food that didn't develop fungus and some 5 days after I find food pelets had some fungus growing on them. As to what else does the common roach contribute to our ecosystem I'm still thinking about it. Would the ecosystem benefit or get worse from a world without the cockroach? I still don't know. A lot of entomology articles label them as pests particularly the german cockroach. Which is consequently a headache to kill off and has no known communities that exist in wild (http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/entomology/444-289/444-289.html). 

Week 8 to 9 Tomato Fruits Have Developed

Tomato that flowered four weeks ago have started to clump up around week 7. The flower petals started to push forward and swirvel up. This leaves the bottom part of the flower exposed and it starts to swell up.

 

The petals manage to stay connected to the developing fruit for a few days. The fruit is the developing plant embryo. The dried up petals fall off and exposes the underside of the new fruit. It takes 7 to 8 days for the this small fruit to develop into the common green tomato fruit that we see in stores.

 

Larger green fruits take around 14 days to develop. As the plant manages to develop fruits it still makes new flowers. 

I realized that by setting the tomato plants in a plot I actually did limit the number of pests that can affect and spread viruses into the plant so on the 8th week we transplated a few plants into the vacant lot beside the house. I will inspect it and post the findings for the 9th week.

Tomato Plants are Blooming

Just last week after I posted my entry into this blog I visited the plants and saw small buds were already present at the highest stem of the plant. It was flower buds. It was dark already so I couldn't get a decent picture so I shot a couple of pictures later in the week of flower buds.

Large Flower Buds with small new flower buds in the middle.

The Flower Buds where growing out of the stem.

These flowers have bloomed already

I noticed that all the flowers that have bloomed are facing downwards not upwards like other flowers. Perhaps could be a way of making sure that the flowers are protected from water. 

Once a plant starts to produce flower buds it still tries to grow higher and new flower buds appear on new stem growth the above the old flower buds.

I made some measurement on plant height and leaf counts

From the samples I took I noticed that the number of leaves seemed to be linked with the height of the plants. It would be an obvious observation but I noticed that some values didn't match up  like the 9 cm plant with 16 leaves when a 12 cm plant had only 8 leaves. So I decided to look at the position of the plants I noticed that plants in the middle of the plot seemed to have more leaves than those at the ends of the plots. The plants at the end of the plots had the where the largest plants in the plot. It maybe that the competition of plants the middle of the plot for sunlight and nutrients could be driving the larger leaf count.  I'll do more observations to check this out.

Now that the plants have the height of 62 to 108 cm I've noticed that the branches grow in a clock wise direction. It's like the plant has a built in system that determines the angle where its branches would grow that would let its leaves absorb the maximum sunlight available.