Worm Form
Created by: Aileen Alvarez & Daisy Lara
OUR GOAL
Aileen and I are conducting this project because worms are very important to the soil and contribute a lot to the environment because they release nutrients that help plants around them. But in recents studies we found that worms are harmful to certain locations, so we thought it was necessary to know where they are and the impact that it is making to the locations around us. We also thought that worms were cool.
How Can You Help?
Other people can help with our experiment by testing the location around them, it can be anywhere, and do a mustard powder extraction and put all of the information in epicollect. It will be interesting if people can share their information, and if we can see a trend.
Materials
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Mustard Powder
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1 Funnel
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Soil Testing Kit
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2 liters of water
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1 trowel
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Soil PH Meter
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Soil thermometer
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1 Jar
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1 Wagon
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4 Rulers
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Humidity Tester
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Regular Thermometer
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Soil Corer
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Soil Testing Bag
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Tweezers
why are we doing this???
This is how you do a worm extractrion!
Did you know?
that worms are invasive to the great lake area due to the ice age, and killed everything in the soil.
What do we do with the information?
Did you know?
Earthworms helps a lot with enriching and improving soil for plants, animals, that is why worms are often put in compost because they release things called castings which has a lot of nutrients
Why mustard powder?
mustard power is not harmful in any way to the worms, so it is safe to humans and worms. The reasons we use mustard powder to extraction the worms is because worms have really sensitive skin due to the really sensitive skin cells that they have. The mustard powder irritates their skin and causes them to rise up to the surface.
Our Results
After analysing our data, we saw that there are many factors that contribute to the number of worms in trial. For example, location played a huge role. Near moist soil areas there seemed to be more worms rather than dry areas in the sunlight. When worms were found near the moist areas the worms were of a much smaller size but they were in much larger quantities. They were identified as epigeic. Another factor was the weather. Many of our samples were collected after a storm, so the soil was very saturated, making it harder for it to absorb the mustard powder. The soil type remained constant as sandy loam but when the soil was clay a couple of worms were found,but it wasn’t a big difference compared to the amount of worms found sandy loam. Therefore, more samples would be needed to make stronger inference. The pH also stayed consistent at 7 but there was two separate occasions when it was six. When the pH was six, worms were found in both occasions. First six worms were found, then 14 worms were found which at that time was our maximum.On our data we found no edogeic worms witch is interesting No inferences can without further investigation because based on our background research worms prefer a pH higher than seven because 6 is usually dangerous for them. Overall, more research and sampling is needed to be able to accurately make conclusions about which variables increase the number of worms.