What Our Experiment is About

Ladybugs in Space will show how micro-gravity will affect the life cycle of a ladybug. We feel that it is important to discover how micro-gravity could affect ladybugs so that in the future, if there are gardens in space, astronauts and scientists will be able to prevent pests like aphids from destroying food resources.

We expect that micro-gravity will speed up the process, that typically takes 26-54 days (from egg to adult) on earth.

While the ladybugs are in space, we will be conducting a ground truth test to monitor our findings and document our results. We will compare our findings after the mission returns back to earth.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Day 3 - We have an escapee!

They are still pretty happy - they seem to be really attracted to the light of the tank. They all like to walk around upside down on the lid of the tank.

Watering the plants and the ladybugs is a two person job let me tell you! The aphids don't seem to care about the lid being open, but those lady bugs sure are eager to escape! I think we lost one that decided to take flight outside of the tank. Oops!

We haven't had any aphids escape - that I know of. I'm actually not even sure how many are left now - I think those ladybugs may have been really hungry, and ate them all up. Gonna keep my eye on that to see if I can find any moving around for the next couple of days. Might have to come up with an alternate food source for them... Till tomorrow...
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