¡Hola padres y madres!
Sophie and Dean here, coming at you live from the ITEC palace. We haven’t seen any of the other blog posts yet, but assure you that this one will be the funniest.
Today we continued to work on our independent projects, which incited joy for some and panic for others. I (Sophie) just returned from my night walk to study my friends (the leaf-cutter ants). My partner (Joe Hille) and I are studying the effects of changing the options that the ants have when they are selecting which leaves to bring back to the colony. First, we give the ants the option to pick up a leaf collected from another ant trail. After that, we give them the option to pick up a leaf from their own path. This is important because ants are blind, and work almost completely by following scent trails along the path. After many hours of watching ants, we’ve proved that the ants are in fact quicker to pick up leaves from their own path. There are more ant facts I could list off, but I’ve decided to spare you. Not being much of a bug person, I wasn’t very excited to be doing this project, but I’ve learned that ants are in fact my friends.
Today in my (Dean’s) corner of the world, Cora, Roshni and I were busy working out in the reef with a small starfish known as the brittle star. We were trying to determine if the color of the sponge that the brittle stars live on correlates with the color of the stars themselves. From the data we collected we found that there was no correlation between the color of the sponge and the color of the brittle stars. We had gone into the study believing the opposite of what we found out in the reef, a prime example of science in action (woah).
In other news, there was a group workout that was utterly laughable. Dean took part and Sophie watched and laughed. After hyping up this workout for several days, Naomi gathered the group in the 90-degree heat of the day and commenced the workout. She was very proud of it. They were outside for 20 minutes tops before throwing in the towel. All that the workout achieved was causing lots of perspiration, not necessarily any physical improvement.
That’s all for now from down in the land of Panama. See ya’ll next week for the next installment of Dean and Sophie on air!