Colby Saxton, Week 3 Linksvayer Lab

         Salutations fellow readers, I have completed my third week at the Linksvayer Lab. This week revolved centrally around completing the nest preference tests but, first on Monday, I completed a Pathfinder assay which yielded very odd results. In this pathfinder assay, I tested 10 ants, and a whopping 6 of them were determined to be pathfinders. A little background; only 15% on average of foragers in a colony are pathfinders. So 6 out of 10 is a significant deviation from that average. That is just something a bit peculiar.

         I was successful in completing all 36 nest preference tests during the past week. Once I completed the tests, I had to come up with a method to score the different nest combinations. this scoring system I created is a point system that awards varying amount of points equal to the ratio of ants that chose one nest over the other(just a reminder, the variables we were testing were nest height, and nest opening size). After collecting the point totals, I created 2 graphs: one with nest height as the independent variable and point total as the dependent variable, and one with nest opening size as the independent variable and point total as the dependent variable. There were some obvious trends in the graphs. As nest height increased, the point total also increased, and as nest opening size increased point total also increased. Therefore, Monomorium pharoanis prefer taller nests with larger nest openings. These findings may change the way nests are designed in our lab.

         Another little side note is I found out that I am in fact allergic to ants. The first 2 weeks I have handled ants without gloves for a fair deal of time, and I got rashes on my arms, neck and face from this exposure. Before you think "what are the odds of me being allergic to the animal I work with" I looked up lab allergies online, and it is not as rare as you might think. In an article I read, it states "approximately one-third of laboratory animal workers have an occupational allergy to animal danders". I have taken more precaution in the lab: I wear gloves at all times now and I wash my hands often. Luckily I did not have any worse reaction and I am extremely lucky that this didn't turn out worse. Safety first!

Signing off,

Colby Saxton