The Effect of Carbon Dioxide Released at Different temperatures on Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches

Abstract

This experiment was designed to see how much carbon dioxide production of a cockroach fluctuates under different temperatures. The experimenters put five cockroaches in three different bio-chambers.  Each chamber was at a different temperature.  The first of the chambers was left at room temperature for a control piece of the experiment.  The hot and cold chambers were heated to 33.6 degrees Celsius and cooled to 10.6 degrees Celsius, respectively.  The cockroaches were left in the bio-chamber for 10 minutes, and then the CO2 was measured with a CO2 probe.  The data collected supported our hypothesis about the thermo-regulation of the cockroaches for the most part.  The cockroaches in the warmer bio-chamber put off more CO2 than the cockroaches in the other two chambers.  This means that cockroaches release more CO2 when the temperature is drastically warmer or drastically colder than they would at natural temperature due to surpassing their metabolic threshold.