The Beetle Experiment

The Bess Beetle experiment 
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As we entered the Missoula Insectarium, I had no idea what to expect. The day before, when we arrived in Missoula, Carolyn had asked us to be guinea pigs for a beetle experiment she was going to try on a class the next day. I was a bit baffled when she showed us the experiment, and it seemed a bit outlandish. What we were going to do was tie a bess beetle to a Petri dish and see if it could drag the petri dish twelve inches, then, if it does, do the same process again but with a penny added to the Petri dish, and see if it can crawl twelve inches again. Then we would keep adding pennies and keep repeating the process until the Bess beetle can't pull the weight of the pennies. But for us, things went wrong from the start. When we got every thing set up, the beetle wouldn't move. Then, we tried to tempt it with pieces of wood, then found out it just couldn't move the weight of the Petri dish. Since that would be an extremely boring experiment, we had to improvise. Soon we found out that we could tape the string to a piece of paper, and it would work just fine! 

We quickly started loading pennies on to Grant's beetle and when his was able to go the twelve inches, we started to work on mine, but sadly, mine didn't move an inch!  Soon, when mine STILL hadn't moved at all, we replaced it with another beetle, whose results were much more satisfactory. As soon as we put the second beetle down, he started running toward the edge of the paper like it was his job, and soon he was pulling six, then nine, then thirteen pennies! Grant and I were both happy with our data, and it was fun looking at how many times its own weight the beetle could pull. My particular beetle, whom we called Bingdoo II, could pull 16 times his weight!  If I had the body of a beetle, myself being 95 pounds, I could pull over 1500 pounds! In addition to doing the bess beetle experiment, we also saw tons of other different insects, including so-called bird-eating spiders, and flesh-eating beetles! So if you ever pass by Missoula, remember to check out the Missoula Insectarium.