Worm motility versus temperature.

(8 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I haven’t run an experiment in some time, and I’ve been missing it.  Until recently.  My almost-eight-year-old nephew had an assignment to do a science experiment, about which he could care less.  To him, he just wants to play four-square with ever-changing and intangible rules that make him ever-the-winner, and he could frankly give a flying fortune about disinterested research.

Naturally, the concerned adults in the room got carried away with the tuitional idea of cause and consequence on their own, somewhat but not entirely independently of the young Padawan learner’s needs.  

 

The experiment devised concerned the motility of earthworms under varying temperature conditions, cold, relatively warm, and hot.  The hypothesis explored would be that earthworms would alter locomotor speeds at different temperatures.  

Experiments often seem like a no-brainer, until you actually conduct them, at which point, reality often intrudes upon one’s preconceptions, but that’s the whole point of the exercise.

We had earthworms, multiple water baths and thermometers, an arena/apparatus of locomotory motivational metrics (wetted grid paper in floating aluminum trays in water baths), timers and data books (a within-subjects (6), repeated measures design X 3 temps, each potential sequence of temps counter-balanced across subjects, for those who care).    Everything was conducted under a red wavelength, so as not to produce inhibitory effects of full spectrum light on locomotion.   Like I said, we got carried away, but to be honest, throw me a fucking bone for acting like an adult.  I want this experiment to be interesting for me, too.  Four-square without rules does not do it for me.

Most of us were assigned to observe a particular “subject,” that we cared “nothing” about, per se, and had some working operational definitions of “movement,” and some procedure for recording movement, i.e., successive hashmarks with each defined movement, whereas my nephew vastly preferred giving each worm a name, e.g., Darth Sidius, and writing his observations of worm movement with a combination of vertical marks, checks, smiley faces, and so on, and assuming that it was not so much an observation as (1) a competition of movement between all, an ill-placed competitive streak that we adults tried to dampen, because observations are not supposed to be competitive, or (2) an opportunity for creativity, which is normally encouraged in eight-year-olds, but harmful to this particular cause.

Observing my nephew, I thought to myself, It’s good to be working with professionals again!

Such critical differences separate the adult from the child. To the adult, interpretations of data may vary, but please collect the data dispassionately, otherwise, almost-eight-year-olds and the Federal Reserve don’t differ by much, in that regard.

Whether we succeeded in our tuitional quest of conveying the principles of the scientific method to my nephew is highly suspect, but we did manage to dampen my nephew’s competitive streak and artsy-fartsy renderings enough so that it did not damage the data too much, and he was certainly impressed by our somber attitudes as we carried out the work.  You’d be surprised how much that part matters to a young mind.  

Here, I present to you for the first time, the data on worm motility versus ambient temperature, as collected by my humble family, WHO WILL KICK YOUR FUCKING ASSES IN FOUR-SQUARE!  So, without further ado:

Worms move faster under heat!

My almost-eight-year-old nephew and I show that it’s true.  Despite our differing motives for this grand work, we can provide the heat to make the worms move.