I decided to have two controls for my experiment: plain water and sugar water. Since I am testing how mosquitoes react to flowers; specifically, the number of eggs I collect, I wanted to get more variant data by having plain water and sugar water. After the first week of my experiment, I saw that many ants infested the sugar water (as anticipated), however, I found more mosquito larvae in the traps that had both sugar and flowers. This concluded that either the mosquitoes were attracted to the scent of the flowers or the appearance.
Living in New York City, there aren't many mosquitoes here, so I was lucky when I found a few! After two weeks, there was a windy rain storm, which knocked down my traps. When I went outside, I was devastated to see my traps on the floor. Looking on the bright side, since I now know that mosquitoes are more attracted to flowers, I am able to set up traps with more specific variables.
Lastly, conducting fieldwork prior to finalizing my research paper assisted me in understanding mosquito behavior, as well as abundance in specific locations.
This experiment leaves a valuable question: are mosquitoes attracted to the scent of the flowers or the appearance?
About the author: Dori is a high school student attending New Dorp High School in Staten Island, New York. Her virtual internship is a part of the collaboration between the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and the NASA Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC) to extend the TSGC Summer Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) internship for U.S. high schoolers. (http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/sees-internship/). Dori shares her experience in this blog post.
