You’re Hot Then You’re Cold; A Study of the Effect of Temperature on Cricket respiration

Abstract

Our experiment sought to find a correlation between House Crickets, (Acheta domestica), and temperature. House Crickets are ectotherms, meaning outside temperature affects their metabolism. Due to this we wanted to see what changes would occur if we tested cricket respiration rates at different temperatures. To test this, we tested CO₂ levels at room temperature for a control, then heated and cooled the respiration chamber by 5 degrees each way to see what affect this had on the crickets. Each temperature had four trials, each lasting five minutes long. With our data, we noticed an increase in CO₂ levels when testing the crickets at five degrees above room temperature. More testing needs to be done before we can correlate temperature with metabolic rate.