Mealworms Redux

I would have thought mealworm investigations were pretty standard in the elementary grades - observation skills, life cycles/metamorphosis, a few controlled experiments varying types of food, etc.

I decided to bring the investigations into my 8th grade Regents Biology classes, simply because I wanted an inexpensive object of long-term observations and a vehicle for discussing things like variation, adaptation, reproduction & development, heredity (to the extent possible within our time constraints), ecology - niches, etc. A lot of content can be related to the mealworms and I can also get students to do controlled experiments that will be part of their required grade 8 project here in NYC.

So far the students are enjoying their investigations. We have completed most of the preliminary observations of the larval stage (the “worm” stage) and are now setting up a couple of simple controlled experiments that will vary the kinds of food they eat, for example, and chart their growth over a couple of weeks. Most of my students, surprisingly, have never done any mealworm investigations. The few that have seen them before did so in the 2nd grade, so they certainly don’t mind revisiting them and looking at them through 8th grade eyes.

I’m not exactly sure how long a complete life cycle will take given our classroom conditions, but they should be able to come up with some more interesting investigations that they will do individually or in pairs to complete their long-term projects – investigations involving other stages of development, for example, transition times, etc.

I’m trying to transition from mental models/black boxes to mealworms and then to Darwin’s model of evolution through natural selection. I'll give more details as I work it out, but the main transitional concept will be variation, as we look at differences among our mealworms in terms of observable features, behaviors, growth patterns, etc.