For my animal collaboration project, I decided to work with lady bugs. Instead of trying to communicate with the entire lady bug population in my community, I wanted to put emphasis on the individual. Therefore, I worked with three specific lady bugs that I found. I wanted to see if the lady bugs would pick up negative or positive “vibes.” To test this idea, I placed lady bugs on handmade paper that I made for this project. While I tried to telepathically send negative or positive thoughts out, I tracked the lady bugs movement from a specific corner in my paper until they flew or crawled off the page. In total, I had 3 pieces of paper with three different lady bugs. Since I wanted to see if there would be an overall correlation between the patterns of the lady bugs movement and the negative, positive, or neutral thoughts I sent out, I decided that I would have to allow the lady bugs multiple opportunities to react to my “vibes”--14 opportunities for each lady bug in total. I also numbered each individual tracking in chronological order from first to last, starting with number 1, ending in number 14.
In my findings, I didn’t find a huge difference between the different lady bugs’ movements and patterns. HOwever, I did notice that Juan, the lady bug who I sent positive vibes to, decided to crawl all the way across my paper on one try, which was quite different compared to the general movement patterns of Scarlett Johansson, who was the lady bug I sent bad “vibes” to. Clarence Jr., the lady big I used for the control group, seemed similar to both other lady bugs in regards to movement.
In conclusion, I would say that my findings were inconclusive; despite the fact that I can clearly see a difference in movement between Scarlett Johansson and Juan, I must remember that each lady bug, like each one of us, is an individual, and therefore the way they decided to move or fly away from my paper may be different simply by nature. Regardless of whether or not I can scientifically draw any kind of conclusion, I still accomplished a collaboration with the lady bugs.
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