So one day after school he went to PetSmart and bought 30 crickets. Fun!
He came home, got a bunch of jars to separate the crickets into, grabbed a clear plastic bin, and began. He had to drill a hole in the bin so the cord for the speaker could fit and then he put a speaker in the bin. After attaching the speaker to his computer, he brought up the website for wavelengths and was set. He numbered the jars and put one cricket in each of the 12 jars. He had the other crickets in reserve in case a cricket died in transit. He then took cricket #1, put him in the bin, put a lid over him, and then started the experiment.
My job was to videotape, so that's what I did...for 120 tests. He did 10 tests on each cricket. Two crickets each got the same sound wave before he changed to a higher sound. It was tedious and took a couple of hours, but he got the data he needed to analyze and was done. And only a few cricket legs were lost in the process.
Turns out, crickets don't care about sound waves. Most of them just went along their merry way. A few even jumped right on the speaker. Once in a while, we would put a cricket on the other end of the bin to see if they would go toward the sound, but it wasn't conclusive. Oh well, it was good to experiment.
When he finished he needed to do something with the crickets. As a scientist, you can't release your test subject into the wild. So I asked around to see if anyone in the neighborhood had snakes or lizards they needed to feed. No one did but one family had chickens. So the next day, Ethan put all the crickets in one bottle and the family came over to get the crickets. Problem solved!
I had so much fun watching him and videotaping. Now he has to collect his data, finish his 10 page paper, and be ready to present at the science fair next month.
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