Today we did a unique experiment-watching the behaviour of an "ant" colony.
The quotes put by me indicate the immediate reaction-"Students of a first semester biology course studying ants? Had all the plant and animal cells vanished or what?
Cell is the most basic structure-not an ant."
Well, as our great Prof.R. Gadagkar puts it-"The process of learning biology(or any other science) doesn't involve just learning facts and principles. You need to develop ways to observe things and describe them honestly and precisely."
Generally our high school texts render biology as a subjective and monotonous subject and generally school students are repelled by biology. But such a holistic way to study biology actually incites interest in the subject within a student from any field.
Coming to my toady's experiment, we made a random observation of a colony of ants initially kept covered inside a petri dish. The organisation of ant and bee colonies may be quite similar, but the ants don't give special treatment to their queen unlike the bees. Quite interesting, isn't it?
Though previously I also did an experiment on training bees to differentiate colour, the bees were quite random in their motion and the experiment was done in open space where external factors could easily affect our observations(and they did, actually causing one of our testing sessions to go in vain, bereft of any observation in particular of a bee entering any one of the 2 tubes which were coloured differently).
Hence, I would just describe today's experiment(moreover, the experiment on bees was done more than a week ago) which consisted of ants differently coloured using a 3-combination colour coding which is very difficult to apply on all the ants in practice, courtesy to the constant efforts by Prof.Gadagkar and his dedicated team of our teaching assistants who help us extensively during laboratory and lecture sessions(more importantly, they don't frown at our stupid questions).
The experiment consisted of 3 portions-observation, description and quantification.
During the observation phase, we had to patiently observe the behaviour of different ants, looking to the colour codes applied to their body for their unique identity and note their visible behaviour on being suddenly exposed to the external environment for an hour in all possilble ways.
The second phase is to describe the observations honestly and precisely.
The third phase consists of quantification of the collected data.
In this way, we did this experiment which indeed helped us to get a hang of the approach we should use in order to
The quotes put by me indicate the immediate reaction-"Students of a first semester biology course studying ants? Had all the plant and animal cells vanished or what?
Cell is the most basic structure-not an ant."
Well, as our great Prof.R. Gadagkar puts it-"The process of learning biology(or any other science) doesn't involve just learning facts and principles. You need to develop ways to observe things and describe them honestly and precisely."
Generally our high school texts render biology as a subjective and monotonous subject and generally school students are repelled by biology. But such a holistic way to study biology actually incites interest in the subject within a student from any field.
Coming to my toady's experiment, we made a random observation of a colony of ants initially kept covered inside a petri dish. The organisation of ant and bee colonies may be quite similar, but the ants don't give special treatment to their queen unlike the bees. Quite interesting, isn't it?
Though previously I also did an experiment on training bees to differentiate colour, the bees were quite random in their motion and the experiment was done in open space where external factors could easily affect our observations(and they did, actually causing one of our testing sessions to go in vain, bereft of any observation in particular of a bee entering any one of the 2 tubes which were coloured differently).
Hence, I would just describe today's experiment(moreover, the experiment on bees was done more than a week ago) which consisted of ants differently coloured using a 3-combination colour coding which is very difficult to apply on all the ants in practice, courtesy to the constant efforts by Prof.Gadagkar and his dedicated team of our teaching assistants who help us extensively during laboratory and lecture sessions(more importantly, they don't frown at our stupid questions).
The experiment consisted of 3 portions-observation, description and quantification.
During the observation phase, we had to patiently observe the behaviour of different ants, looking to the colour codes applied to their body for their unique identity and note their visible behaviour on being suddenly exposed to the external environment for an hour in all possilble ways.
The second phase is to describe the observations honestly and precisely.
The third phase consists of quantification of the collected data.
In this way, we did this experiment which indeed helped us to get a hang of the approach we should use in order to
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