ANT PICNIC ACTIVITY

ANT PICNIC ACTIVITY ABOUT THIS ACTIVITY Searching New Game-Changing Species Fungi (inhowever your backyard, on ants) Dietfor preferences and needs for humans are wellof documented, we are still learning about the diet preferences of ants

in different parts of the world. What ants eat at different times of the year and in different places around the world tells us might be missing in their environment andproduced how climate by change could impact ant day populations. We rely what on enzymes and other compounds microbes every without realizing it. We rely

on microbes and the Rob their products produce detergents, bread, yoghurt and ant much more. Since 2011 Dunn Lab attoNorth Carolinaantibiotics, State University has been asking the question, “Which species live And as we look to the future, the potential of microbes to offer ever more solutions to society is great. See, where?” and citizen scientists have been answering by collecting ants with cookies in their backyards and schoolyards and mailingthis themvideo to the lab. weMadden are asking another question for example, by Now Anne from our lab about those ants: What do ants prefer to eat around the world? (https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_madden_meet_the_microscopic_life_in_your_home_and_on_your_f In this activity, students learn about the major food groups and explore the diet preferences of ants by participating in a real ace). Butscience a challenge finding microbes these abilities in the firstpresent place.atHow, for and project. is Students willthe set out prescribedwith ant food baits,useful collect the baits, count the ants each bait, example,share do the wedata findwith microbes to break (andto help withwith the massive a scientist.able The data studentsdown collectplastics will contribute a largedeal database data from students from all accumulation of world plastic down lipids and use helpthese turn food wasteregional and other fatstrends intoin ant around the whowastes) are doingor thebreak same experiment. Scientists data to explore and global preferences so they can learnare about complex likemicrobial the environment and climate change. yet fewer energy?food By some estimates there asmore many as a things trillion species on Earth, and than twoThere hundred of those species have been well-studied with regard to activity. the benefits theytheoffer to are several additional lesson modules that will work well in combination with this For instance, Ant Picnic human society and daily life. We need a way to better find new, useful, microbes and find their novel Data Analysis Activity allows students to explore their ant picnic data further, ask (and answer) their own scientific questions uses. This wheretheir youdata come We would like you tothe help usInfind new microbes (fungi particular) andiscompare with in. ant picnic data collected around world. the Ant ID Activity students learnin how to identify ants, including they have as part of their and more activities able to break downants lipids, and collected we would like youAnt to Picnic. do it These by collecting ants. can be found at discoverants.com/educational-resources

HERE’S WHAT YOU’LL NEED

North Carolina Standards Alignment • 8.L.3.1 Explain how factors such as food, water, shelter and space affect populations in an ecosystem. • 8.L.5.1 Summarize how food provides the energy and the molecules required for building materials, growth and survival of all organisms (to include plants). • Bio.4.1.1 Compare the structures and functions of the major biological molecules (carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids) as related to the survival of living organisms.

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Lesson plan also available at studentsdiscover.org/lesson/ant-picnic

Extra Virgin Olive Oil Amino Acids: L-Glutamine powder in solution (20% solution) Sugar Water (20% solution) Salt Water (1% solution) Water (tap water is ok) 5 containers for solutions (e.g., glass jars, flasks, etc.) Measuring spoons or scale Cotton balls (5 per group) Pecan Sandies cookies (or a similar shortbread cookie) Student Data Sheet (one per student) + Answer Key “Experiment in Progress” signs (one per group) Sandwich Ziploc bags (6 per group) White 3×5 index cards (6 per group) Pencils for data recording and labeling Ant Picnic Introduction video & Thank you for participating in Ant Picnic video – watch with students “Ants and Citizen Science” video – optional but helpful

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Why ants? Ants are astonishingly abundant and (at least to us) fascinating. They farm fungus. They grow gardens of seeds. They turn over soil and act as predators of species we don’t like. Ants are wondrous. But ants are also, very often, covered in fungi. Some of the fungi ants are covered with are species they just bump into in their daily lives. As a result, we can sample the fungi on ants as a quick way to get a measure of the fungi in the environment more generally. But there is something else at play too. Because they are social and often live in high densities, ants (like humans) have to deal with an extraordinary number of pathogens, pathogens that make them sick, kill them or worse, take over their bodies and brains. For example, fungi of the genus Cordyceps take over the brains of ants and cause them to climb high on branches and bite down. The fungus then grows through the (still living) body of the ant, sprouts a fruiting body out of the ant’s head and in doing so, “hopes” to increase the chances it will be eaten by a bird (and spread somewhere new). Such fungi are gruesome and fascinating. They also happen to be relatively poorly characterized and an extraordinary source of novel compounds. No fewer than three commercial medicines come from these fungi and more may be developed in the future. In addition, these fungi, in taking over the bodies and brains of ants, are known to produce lipases. For all of these reasons, we think ants are an excellent place to begin to search for new, useful fungi. But we need your help.

The truth is that for as much as we can sample ants and test them for fungi on our own, the work is faster and more creative if we can involve you to sample places we might not think to sample or that we simply can’t get to.

So what you can do is to, using the ant picnic protocol, collect ants. Then freeze them in their bags for at least 48 hours. You can bring them to us at the Coaches Clinic in October, or you can send them (after freezing) to: NC Science Olympiad NCSU Box 8211 Raleigh, NC 27695 *Please be sure to include your school name and location on all the index cards so that we can let you know what you discovered!* Thank you to our sponsor, Novozymes, for supporting this project!

ANT PICNIC ACTIVITY CONT. BEFORE YOU START (HELPFUL HINTS) • Before you start this activity, we suggest to do a general introduction to ants. For instance, you can do the Spirit Ant Activity before starting Ant Picnic and allow students to present their work to one another during the hour-long wait time when the food baits are set up outside. An even more general introduction to ants can be found at discoverants.com/whyants • The ant picnic experiment will work best on a warm day with no rain and no or minimal wind. If it is windy, you will need to secure the index cards (with a small rock or skewer) so they don’t get blown away. • The baits need to be left out for at least one hour – if you only have a shorter class period, you can consider having one class period set out the baits and a later class period pick them up and count the ants. Final data can be shared with the earlier class period the following day. Additionally, ants can be frozen and counted during a later class period. • If you are doing this experiment in a nut-free school, you can use a nut-free shortbread cookie as your cookie bait. • Please, do not add any additional food types to your ant picnic. We will not be able to use your experimental data if you don’t follow the protocol meticulously. See extension activities for additional options if you are interested in testing different food baits. • Please review the extension activities section. You can make the experiment more challenging by having students set up their experiments in a green and a paved space and compare the results. We also provide an option for a more general data comparison if the Ant Picnic Data Analysis Activity cannot be completed.

DIRECTIONS 1.

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Warm up exercise (approx. 5 min) as students arrive to class (directions can be written on the board or projected so that students can complete task while teacher takes roll or completes other administrative tasks): • Take out a blank sheet of paper and pen/pencil. • Make a list of everything you have eaten over the past 48 hours. • To the best of your abilities, categorize these food items by type, e.g., meat, poultry, vegetable, starch, etc. After 5 minutes have elapsed, you can engage students in a discussion of different food types and varying qualities of each type. You can refer to a food pyramid if no nutrition program is available for students to reference. Watch Ant Picnic Introduction video with students.

Prepare baits: • Put 3 1/2 tablespoons (50 g) of pure L-Glutamine powder in 250 mL of water (Note that the powder will not dissolve in the water, you’ll need to just mix it before soaking the cotton ball!) • Put 3 1/2 tablespoons (50 g) of sugar in 250 ml of water (You might need to heat up the solution!) • Put 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 g) of salt in 250 ml of water • Quarter some Pecan Sandies, you’ll need one quarter per bait station. If you are using a different shortbread cookie use approx. 1 square inch. No special preparation is required for extra virgin olive oil and water. DO NOT add any additional food types to your Ant Picnic experiment! This would change the experimental protocol and we wouldn’t be able to compare your results to everyone else’s. If your students are interested in testing other food types, please refer to extension activities. directions continue on next page


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ANT PICNIC ACTIVITY CONT. DIRECTIONS CONT. Optional: Discuss the importance of a control in a scientific experiment. – By definition the control in a science experiment is a sample that remains the same throughout the experiment. This is done to establish a baseline in order to confirm that you’re measuring what you’re intending to measure. For Ant Picnic, the control can be considered in 2 ways: • The proper control for this experiment is a dry cotton ball – if ants come to the dry cotton ball just as they come to the other food choices then the experimental design needs to be reevaluated. For Ant Picnic, this test has already been done by scientists when they tested the experimental method for the first time. That’s why students don’t need to add a dry cotton ball to their experiment every time. • The water food choice could also be considered a control, since we are mainly measuring food choice as it relates to nutrition. However, in some environments ants might be dehydrated and in need of water. Therefore, we are also interested in how many ants choose water.

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Put students into small groups (3-6 students) – each group can conduct one experiment (i.e. place 6 baits). If materials are scarce or class size is small, it is also an option to set up one experiment as a whole class.

All following directions are per group:

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Label 6 index cards with the bait type names (amino acids, cookie, oil, salt, sugar, water), the date and a unique identifier (e.g., group name, number or symbol).

Soak one cotton ball in each of the 5 solutions and prepare to bring the soaked cotton balls outside to your experiment site. Also bring a quartered Pecan Sandie cookie (or about 1 square inch of a shortbread cookie) and prepare to crush it at your experiment site. Warning: Students who are allergic to nuts should not manage the Pecan Sandies! Put your 6 index cards down at your experiment site and place a cotton ball soaked in the corresponding solution and a crushed cookie onto each index card. Arrange them approx. 5 inches apart from each other. This can be done in a circle or a row or however you would like. Record the start time and information about the site and weather conditions on the worksheet.

Wait at least one hour. During this time return to the classroom and engage your students in class discussion using the discussion questions (see worksheet) as a guide. If you have additional time, consider doing the Spirit Ant Activity (or one of the other teaching modules you can find at discoverants.com/educational-resources).

After one hour return to your bait stations, bring 6 zip-lock bags and record the end time on the worksheet. Carefully walk up to your bait stations (so you don’t scare any ants off) and BEFORE picking up any index cards, count the number of ants you see. Record the numbers for each bait type on your worksheet (if there are too many ants you can estimate the numbers). It is possible that some or all of your baits will have no ants at all. This is also a result of this experiment so go ahead and record your data. We still want to know about it, even if all your numbers are zeros. But please, note that even if you don’t see any ants at first, they may be small and light-colored or they may be UNDER the index card. Pick up each index card as if there were ants and put it in a zip-lock bag as explained in the next step. When you return to the classroom examine it carefully to confirm that there were really no ants at the bait. Take a picture of your experiment. The ants at each bait type and your labels of each index card should be clearly visible. You can also take individual pictures of each bait card.

directions continue on next page Lesson plan also available at studentsdiscover.org/lesson/ant-picnic

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ANT PICNIC ACTIVITY CONT. DIRECTIONS CONT.

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Quickly place each index card including the cotton ball and any ants into one bag. This might be difficult because ants gathered at the bait might escape as you pick up the card. (Do not combine all index cards into one bag!) Warning: Students who are allergic to ants should not complete this task in the rare likelihood that they will be stung or bitten!

Bring the zip-lock bags into the classroom and count how many ants are in each bag (do this through the bag, do not open it!). Counting is done three times for each bag and then averaged. Record values on the worksheet. Once the ants are counted they can be released back to where they were collected. If the number of ants is higher than students can comfortably count while the ants are moving around, place the zip-lock bag in the freezer overnight and count the ants the next day; high numbers can be estimated by dividing the bag into quadrants. If you are running out of time, you can freeze all zip-lock bags overnight and have students count their ants during the next class period. Enter the data online here. This step should be done either by the teacher or with extensive teacher supervision to ensure everything is being entered correctly. – Your data has now been sent to the scientist and will be incorporated into the large data set of students around the world doing Ant Picnic. Watch Thank you for participating in Ant Picnic video with students.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXTENSION • Compare green and paved sites Set up your Ant Picnic experiment in both a green location (grassy or woody) and a paved location (sidewalk or parking lot) at the same time. Record each site as a separate experiment following the directions above. When you are done, you can compare the number of ants that arrived at these different site types as well as the food preferences of the ants. This adds an extra level to the experiment, which will challenge more advanced students.

• Add more food types If you would like to compare other food types in addition to the standard Ant Picnic baits, you can do that in a separate experiment. Please, set this up on a different day or in an area at least 50 yards away from your regular Ant Picnic experimental site. If you would like to share your data from your own unique experiment please enter it in the comments section when you submit your Ant Picnic data, we would love to hear what kind of foods you tried and how the ants liked it! • Ant picnic data exploration If you do not have time to complete the Ant Picnic Data Analysis Activity or consider these analyses too advanced for your students, please use these activity sheets for a more basic ant picnic data exploration and discussion. Students can share and compare their data in class and draw conclusions about the reasons why ants were more prevalent in some areas over others or why certain bait types were preferred.


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ANT PICNIC ACTIVITY CONT. ABOUT THE SCIENCE We want to learn more about what ants eat in different environments: in your backyard, on your school’s playground, at the park. How fast do they come to sugar, how fast do they come to a cookie you drop or how fast do they come to all these food sources around us. Ants are looking to have a balanced diet just like us. Their food preferences at different times of the year and in different places around the world tell us what is missing in their environment.

The results you collect will be incorporated into the biggest study of global patterns in preferred resources and activity within a single group of organisms. The effect of ant resource preferences are felt every time you go on a picnic or let your sandwich lie around for too long. In some places the ants arrive quickly to eat your leftovers, in other places they don’t. Ants eat different kinds of foods with different speeds and we want to know what environmental variables govern this resource preference.

The next goal of this project is to understand, in light of differences from place to place (how much rain there is, how hot it is, how much food we leave out and how many buildings there are) what determines how fast ants come to different kinds of food. We have big predictions about what this should look like globally. We think that in the tropics, ants get to all the food faster than anywhere else. We think that in the desert the ants are probably faster to get to water. But we don’t actually know this anywhere in the world yet. What we especially don’t know is how what ants do in the wild of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park or Peru or Copenhagen compares to what happens in your backyard. This is where the data you are collecting comes in; you will help us to see what’s really going on at your picnic. Join students and scientists around the world who have sampled for Ant Picnic; ranging from students in Peru to the Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.

ABOUT THE SCIENTIST Dr. Magdalena Sorger is a postdoctoral researcher at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Pennsylvania State University. She’s an evolutionary ecologist interested in the diversity, distribution, and behavior of ants and other insects.


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Ant Picnic Student Data Sheet Name of participant (or group members) Date of observation Start time of experiment Finish time of experiment Weather Conditions Outside temperature (Celsius) Weather description (circle one) Wind (circle one) Site Information Is your site in the shade? (circle one) Is there anything near your site that may attract ants?

Sunny

Partly cloudy

Cloudy

Calm

Light wind

Windy

No

Partially

Yes

Latitude of experiment site Longitude of experiment site Annual mean precipitation (mm) Distance to ocean (km) Elevation (m) Biome

Prediction: Which food type will the ants prefer? Give a reason for your prediction. _________________________________________ _____________________________________ _________________________________________

(trash cans, fruit trees, picnic tables, etc.)

Where did you set up your experiment?

Objective: In order to see what ants in our area prefer to eat, we will set out six bait types for them to choose from: ● Amino acids ● Cookie (Pecan Sandies) ● Extra Virgin Olive Oil ● Salt ● Sugar ● Water

_____________________________________ Green space

Paved space

Procedure: Follow your teacher’s directions to set up the bait stations outside. While you wait for the ants to find your food baits, answer the following discussion questions.

1. What types of food do we require for a healthy diet? Why? _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. What food group includes bread, pasta and potatoes? Why is it important to eat these foods? _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Where do we get our protein from? Why is it important to eat protein? _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ Developed by Dr. D.M. Sorger & P. Derouin as part of the “Ant Picnic Activity” | studentsdiscover.org/lesson/ant-picnic | discoverants.com

4. What food items contain fat or oil? Why is it important to eat these food types? _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ 5. Do you think ants like the same food types we do? Why or why not? _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ ● After 1 hour has passed, follow your teacher’s directions to pick up your ants. ● Before you put the ants in the bag, count them. If there is a very high number of ants on your bait card, estimate the number present. Data collection 1. For each bait type, count the number of ants in the bag three times. (three different students should count each bag if possible) 2. Average your three counts for the most accurate data. Round to the nearest whole ant. Total Ants Amino Cookie Olive Salt Sugar Water Acids

Oil

Pre-collection count

Count 1 Count 2 Count 3 Final number (average of counts 1-3)

Bait type Amino Acids Cookie Olive Oil Salt Sugar

Number of ants

Ranking

Bait data 1. Fill the chart with the average number of ants at each bait station. 2. Rank the bait stations from 1-6 (1 is most popular) Why do you think that ants preferred the top-ranked food choice at your experiment site? _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________

Water Developed by Dr. D.M. Sorger & P. Derouin as part of the “Ant Picnic Activity” | studentsdiscover.org/lesson/ant-picnic | discoverants.com

ANT PICNIC OVERVIEW

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cotton balls

cookie

L-Glutamine powder

water

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WATER

SUGAR

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Experiment in progress OIL

OIL

mixing jars

salt

sugar

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1. PREPARE BAITS

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2. LABEL IN DEX CARDS

3. SET OUT BAITS

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SALT

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DS AMINO ACI

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4. WAIT ONE HOUR

5. COUNT ANTS ON BAITS

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7. COLLECT ANTS

discoverants.com studentsdiscover.org/lesson/ant-picnic

E 6. TAKE A PICTUR

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8. COUNT ANTS IN BAGS

9. ENTER DATA ONLINE - YOUR DATA HAS BEEN SENT TO A SCIENTIST!

In collaboration with: Artwork by Emilia Rubæk Holm (some additions by D.M. Sorger)

Experiment in Progress: Ant Picnic PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB!

DATE: TIME: CONTACT INFO:

Experiment in Progress: Ant Picnic PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB!

DATE: TIME: CONTACT INFO: