Are You What You Eat?
Lesson Overview:
Students and/or teachers will add food coloring to Manduca diet. The food coloring will effect Manduca's pigment. Teacher can use the image of the Manduca found in nature and the Manduca raised in the laboratory or classroom to help students see the contrast before beginning the experiment.
Subject Area Focus: Science
Materials:
- Food coloring (gel style food coloring works best and is least messy)
- Pieces of Manduca food
- Mag-lite flashlight
- Cellulose acetate report covers (blue, yellow)
- Overhead Projector
Objectives:
- Answer whether or not the color of food affects Manduca pigment
- Consider how coloration affects an insect's life in nature
Procedure:
- Dye Manduca food using food coloring (green, blue, red, yellow)
- Feed the Manduca this colorful diet.
- Make an observation toward the end of the day using a Mag-lite flashlight about the color of the inside of the Manduca. Almost the entire inside of the insect will be tinted the color of the diet you feed your Manduca. The end cavity, where most of Manduca's blood is stored, the head cavity and leg areas will all remain the original greenish pigment. The rest of the insect, the tinted parts, are all part of the Manduca gut. What a huge space for food!
- Have students make daily observations in their observation journals specifically about color, or keep track of this experiment as a whole class on a large observation chart. Fairly soon the entire Manduca will turn a shade of the diet color you feed it.
- Questions:
Which color food changes Manduca the most?
Which color food doesn’t really affect Manduca?
What are the advantages of turning a similar pigment as the food you eat? - Teacher should show students the image of a Manduca feed with its natural diet and a Manduca fed classroom/lab diet on the same leaf. Which one would survive longer in nature?
- Teacher can demonstrate how the insect creates the color that we see using cellulose acetate report covers on an overhead projector. By laying the blue and yellow cellulose (overhead sheets) over the top of one another on an overhead, students will be able to see that blue and yellow make green.
