Hornworm Help

We are studying hornworms to see what factors help a hornworm make it through their life cycle.
Cayla Winter Maya Moore
Grade 5

Hypothesis

We think hornworms will survivee better eating tomatos or hornworm food and burrowing in a big dirt enclosure.

 

 

 

Research

Tomatos are actually deadly to hornworms it makes them big and juicy but it makes them sick too.

There are two differnt types of hornworms tomato and tobacco. Hornworms eat crops.

Variables

Controlled variables: Always using tobacco hornworms and always using the same enclosure, same temperature, same amount of food (tomatoes or hornworm paste) same amount of light exposure. 

Manipulated variables: They eat either hornworm paste or tomatoes and the either burrow in paper or soil.

Procedure

We made a chart of the hornworms we had and what happened. For our first four hornworms we gave them hornworm paste and paper to burrow in and unfortunately they all passed away. For the next lot of four hornworms we gave three hornworm paste and dirt to burrow in and one tomatoes and dirt to burrow in. Two of the hornworm paste eating caterpillars passed away. We compared the differnce between the tomato eating hornworm and the remaining hornwormpaste eating hornworm and they were the same in size but the tomato hornworm had turned a darker green while the hornworm paste hornworm was the same color as before. The tomato eating hornworms sadly died but the hornwormpaste eating hornworm burrowed! We have one more tomato eating hornworm and dirt burrowing to see what happens.

Observations

So far the tomato eating hornworm  passed away and the hornworm food eating hornworm has became a pupae. Some hornworms seem sick and pass away and some are very healthy. The tomato and paste eating hornworm have a big color difference.

 

Analysis

We fed three hornworms tomatos and what happened from our data was they all started to have a little white between their segments and they seemed sick. The tomato also seemed to make them paler in color so from that data we think that tomatoes are actually very unhealthy for hornworms and will make them sick and sadly pass away. On the other hand the hornworm paste is like a smoothie of vitamins and it makes them thirve! The hornworm paste makes the hornworms healthy and strong so they are able to successfully make it through their life cycle.

Conclusion

We noticed that tomatoes make hornworms big and juicy but they also make them sick. On the other hand hornworm food makes hornworms big and strong so the can successfully complete their life cycle. Dirt is also the best material for them to burrow in.

Application

From our experiment we learned that diet and environment affect the ability of hornworms to complete their life cycle. This is important because it shows that the environment and climate change may affect the life cycles of other insects and animals, which may impact how plants grow and ultimately, how humans will survive.

Sources Of Error

We were unable to control the initial health of the hornworms that we purchased from the pet store. 

Acknowledgement

We use the websites: 

 

 

Wikapidia

We acknowledge Faith moor and jen winter for suporting us on this jorny. Thnk you for giving us pointer and helping us out . They also sacrifice their freetime for us so thank you very much!

We also acknowledge Vanessa blyth and mr. chong for being our since teacher we coudent have done it without them!