It's a Colorful World: How Choosy Are Insects about Color?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of my project is to determine what color insects are most attracted to: white, red, orange, yellow, green, or blue. The reason I am doing this investigation is to discover if having certain colors in my home and in my garden will be likely to attract or deter insects. Methods/Materials Place 1 bowl of each color (white, red, orange, yellow, green, and blue) in 5 predetermined random locations. Fill each bowl with water and several drops of dish soap, and leave undisturbed for 2 days. Collect the bowls and with an eye dropper, remove, count, and sort the trapped insects in each bowl. Analyze and graph the data to determine which color insects prefer. Results The results indicate that yellow attracts more insects than the other 5 colors that were tested. Out of the 2,207 insects that were trapped in the 30 bowls, White attracted 5.7%, Red attracted 4.2%, Orange attracted 22%, Yellow attracted 51.3%, Green attracted 7.2%, and Blue attracted 9.6%. Conclusions/Discussion After completing my investigation on what color insects are most attracted to, I found that my hypothesis was incorrect. My hypothesis stated that white would attract the most insects. Instead, I found that only 5.7% of the insects that I trapped were attracted to the color white. Yellow was actually the color that attracted the most insects (51.3%). Red, white, blue, and green were not significantly different in the number of percent of insects trapped; however, orange and yellow trapped quite a bit more insects. After my investigation, I would recommend avoiding the color yellow unless you are trying to attract a lot of insects.

Awards (1)

• Fourth Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2015 Zoology · Entry J2204

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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