Jay and Tyler’s words of wisdom
We suggest to put more butterflies per cage, to maximize mating. The bottleneck for the experiment seemed to be in the mating stage.
The greenhouse was very hot and humid for several days. We think this may have affected the health and/or mating of the butterflies. An environment that suits the butterflies better may be better.
It was hard to record what days the butterflies eclosed - some died in pupae form, and some died shortly after eclosion
We ended up taking our adult count by just collecting those that had died, rather than trying to count a cage full of moving butterflies.
Perhaps a better system for predicting eclosion could be developed - we had a few pupae that eclosed in the petri dishes in the incubator. These actually looked perfectly normal and seemed active, however.
For how many larvae we had, two undergrads wasn’t enough - we suggest 3-4 undergrads for the number of larvae we had, especially during the initial stage when the eggs we collected from the field begin to hatch.
We thought of a better system for numbering and separating the larvae into different treatments - we could simply put all the odd numbers as SD, and the even numbers as LD.
It would be cool to set up a GoPro for a day to see what the butterflies are actually doing during the day.