fairfolio
Saved Projects

Fields for Flight: Effects of Magnetic Fields on Butterfly Navigation

ISEF · 2015 Systems Software

Etter, Jeremiah

Is this your project?

Overview

The goal of this project was to investigate whether Painted Lady Butterflies (Vanessa cardui) migrate using an internal compass, if the internal compass can detect strong or unnatural magnetic fields, and if butterflies raised as larvae around strong magnetic fields can detect the field as adults. I tested the larval stage by exposing them to magnets oriented in an east-west direction, with two different field strengths based on the distance from the magnets (1.0 gauss and 2.5 gauss). I had 5 different groups of insects; a control group placed away from the magnets, two groups placed near a north-south magnetic field at two different distances (20cm, 1.0 gauss; 10cm, 2.5 gauss), and two groups placed near an east-west field at two different distances (20cm, 1.0 gauss; 10cm, 2.5 gauss). Insects were scored for movement by placing them onto a numbered/lettered grid, and counting the number of times them moved or flew in a cardinal direction (N, S, E, W). My data revealed that a few larvae groups did respond to magnetic fields, but the majority of larva groups did not, leading me to believe that larvae are not particularly sensitive to changes in magnetic field direction or strength. All five groups adult groups oriented to Earth's magnetic field (with statistical significance) regardless of what they had been exposed to as larvae. This supports my hypothesis that adults would respond to and move in relation to cardinal directions after exposure to a magnetic field. The insects also seemed to respond to light during testing, leading me to believe that other factors such as sunlight direction, intensity, or day length in addition to sensitivity to magnetic fields may contribute to their abilities to migrate long distances.

Working on something like this? See what's been done and what's still open.

Competition history

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Report a problem

Source: Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google