The caterpillars have spoken!

The last 2 weeks have been crazy! As you know (if you have read previous lab notes), I have been growing corn in the soils that I collected from different fields in PA and OH. These plants grew so differently in the different soils! 

If you will also remember, we steam treated each of the soils to compare living and "sterilized" soils to look at the effects of microbes on the plants. This turned out to have an effect on how the plants grew!

 

Example of plant growth in steamed (right) and live (left) soils

The taller plant here is from the steamed soil!  

We put caterpillars (black cutworm) on each plant in a clip cage to contain how far it moved and how much it ate. 

 

Caterpillars feed along the mid-rib in the clip cage as you can see here

 They ate the leaves pretty fast, so we moved the clip cages around so that they would still have plant tissue to eat for the 6 days they were on the plant! Unfortunately, the caterpillars have a tendency to escape, so next time we may have to put a little bit of cotton in the leaf veins to keep them from getting away (we only recovered about half of the caterpillars we put out there)

 

Example of leaf damage (I am quantifying all of it - still in progress)

However, we did find differences in caterpillar growth between soil treatments!! Not sure what the big picture is yet, but we have a promising start! 

 

Representative caterpillars (L=live soil, S=steamed soil).

In the soil shown above, the caterpillar from the live soil is smaller.