CO2 emissions in ectotherms at varying temperatures

Abstract

We tested crickets (Gryllus assimilis) to determine whether certain animals eat more at certain temperatures than they do at other temperatures (French, 2014).  We know that the crickets are ectotherms meaning that their body temperatures fluctuate with the environment, and their metabolic rates are influenced by their body temperature.  Due to this knowledge, we believed that if we place the crickets in lower temperatures, then they will be less active and their metabolic rates decrease.  We tested our hypothesis by placing crickets into respiration chambers at 5ºC above and 5 ºC below room temperature and compared their CO₂ emission to a control group in a respiration chamber at room temperature. While our results were not statistically significant, we did see a biological difference in the decrease of metabolic rate per mass at decreasing temperatures. With these results, we deduce that the temperatures we used during our experiment were most likely not out of their thermal neutral zone. This may be the reasoning for our results not being statistically significant.