Bill Molnar
River Dell Regional High School
Oradell, New Jersey

1. Go out on the school grounds and, with a spoon and paper cup, capture at least 20 pill bugs. The best areas are around fence lines or places where debris has accumulated. You may also do this at home in your own yard. Could you change the conditions of your location, or put out bait, to make it easier to capture the pill bugs? Make notes about the habitats you found that contained the most pill bugs. Place them in the large plastic container in the classroom for use in the rest of this assignment.
2. Place 10 pill bugs in a petri dish and observe them for 5 to 10 minutes. Note how they move around the dish and interact with each other. Do they prefer one area of the dish to another? Do they continuously move around or do they settle down? Are their movements random, or do they seem purposeful? Do they keep the same shape during the time period? If they change shape, when does it happen? Can you predict when it will happen again? Do they stay apart or do they form groups? Do they seem to acknowledge the presence of others and if so, how? Make your observations without disturbing the pill bugs. You want to observe their behavior, not their reactions to you.
3. Make a detailed drawing of a pill bug.

1. Prepare choice chambers by connecting two or more plastic petri dishes together by melting them with a hot glass rod. Abut the dishes and press the hot glass rod down through the touching sides so that they melt together. Press all the way to the bottom of the dishes. The dishes should now be connected, with an opening between them.
2. The first experiment you will do will be to see the pill bug's preference for a wet or dry environment. Place two pieces of filter paper on the desktop and cover them with the choice chambers. Make one filter paper wet (but not saturated) and leave the other dry. With a paintbrush or a pencil eraser, carefully place five pill bugs on one paper and five on the other. Quickly place the petri dish choice chambers over the filter papers. Every 30 seconds, count the number of pill bugs in each chamber. Do this for 10 minutes. When you are done return the pill bugs to their container.
3. Now design your own experiment. Using the same chambers you just made, create another set of variables to test and perform that experiment. You may want to try varying pH, amount of light, temperature, etc. You may even want to use more than two petri dishes. How could you test multiple variables and leave a control (for example, food preferences)?