1) Drawing from your previoius observations of the behaviors and related ethograms of crickets, each research team should develop a protocol to study how specific stimuli influence behaviors. Your goal is to design a study with sufficient replication and controls to be able to discriminate whether a particular stimulus or environmental condition has an impact on behavior (i.e., does a behavior change in the presence/absence of the stimulus).

2) You will have the entire lab period available to test your hypotheses using available materials and the experimental protocol you have designed. Remember, you want to be rigorous, objective, and quantitative in your assessment of the stimulus presentation and your observations of the cricket's response (or lack thereof). Record your data and summarize the results upon completion of your trials

3) If you have not completed your experiments by the time the lab period is over, you will need to make arrangements to complete your study at another time. Remember that the lab is occupied by courses on T/Th and F from 1-4 PM.

4) Bring your data to lab the following week for analysis and interpretation of the results. A written lab report, co-authored by each pair of researchers (you and your lab partner) will be due two weeks after that (week 8). The write up should follow the basic format of a scientific paper (Title, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, Literature Cited) and describe what you did, what you found, and what you infer from those results with regard to the relationship between location and behavior. A protocol for lab write-ups can be found here.