Project:

Does a specific frequency of sound attract ants?

Students:

Tiffany Gao, Fariha Annass

School:

Connetquot High School, Suffolk

Mentors:

John Halloran

Abstract:

Our experiment seeks to study whether any specific frequency of sound attracts ants. Based on previous studies, ants can recognize sound by “acoustic receptors [which] are hairlike sensilla on the antennae that respond to particle sound velocity” because they lack ears. For this experiment, we played sounds ranging from 0 kHz – 3 kHz because the ants emit signals that “peak around 700 Hz, with most of the spectral content below about 1.5 kHz." Based on this, we hypothesized that 1 kHz frequency would attract a greater diversity of ants. We collected the ants by hand collecting them from the bait and the pitfall traps. To keep ants from climbing out of the cups we put soap and water in the cup for a short period of time, we dried them and then kept the specimens in the freezer at -20°C until DNA extraction. For this experiment, DNA Barcoding is required to identify the specific ant specimens that are being collected because DNA barcoding provides “more precise results compare

Poster:

Team samples: