My zoology professor wants to know: what sort of experiments can you do with acorn weevils. He’s got a whole bunch of acorns, and thus probably a whole bunch of grubs, but he’s so far at loss as to what scientific-y things we can do with them in a classroom. He asked me to help him out here, and I told him one of the places I’d look was this message board I know where you can ask the most obscure questions and get mostly factual answers.
Google so far has a bunch of stuff about them eating and laying eggs and growing up (acorns, in acorns, and exiting acorns, respectively), but nothing that’s given me any ideas. So I know this is a weird question, but what do you think we should do with them? What are some general facts about acorn weevils? If I get advice and weevil facts, does that make this a GQ or IMHO thread?
What can you do with an acorn weevil,
What can you do with an acorn weevil,
What can you do with an acorn weevil,
Early in the morning?
Sorry–had to be done.
But, seriously–what kind of class is your zoology professor teaching?
If he’s covering biodiversity and evolution, he’s going to have to discuss some evo-devo topics. Weevils have a rather distinctive head morphology. It might be worth pinning and putting beetles of different families under dissecting scopes and letting people see differences in head morphology among several beetle families, including weevils.
Your professor might be able to use the weevils as animals for intro bio students to make and test hypotheses about. Just about every first-year bio course for science majors has some sort of lab exercise in which students have to come up with hypotheses, test them, and then use some sort of statistical analysis (usually a t-test or chi-square) to determine if their data supports or contradicts their hypotheses.
Students could play with the weevils for a bit (only you’d call it “making key observations that motivate hypotheses”), and then design and conduct experiments to answer ask simple questions like:
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Do weevils tend to walk towards or away from light? Or do they have no preference? (In my limited experience playing with acorn weevils while taking breaks from field work, they’re shy little critters. They tend to disappear into holes in acorns whenever they can.)
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Does the rate of acorn consumption increase at higher environmental temperatures? (It should, up to a point. Temperatures between 10 C and, say, 35 C might be useful for this. In fact, you could use the weevils in a lab that contrasts the respiratory rates of ectotherms with endotherms, looking at differences in CO2 production at different environmental temperatures.)
Let us know what your prof decides to do with the weevils. Now I’m kind of curious to know.
You could put them in a candy box and mail them to people to you don’t like.
Pin them next to butterflies, to show the students the dichotomy between good and weevil.
How fast do they burrow? It might be fun to set up a race, with each lab group getting their own weevil and the same number of acorns in a little narrow box, or something.
Pan-fried with garlic and a little salt.
Thanks guys, you’re a big help.