Cheese Anyone?
Abstract
Have you ever wondered which animal is faster thinker? Well, for this lab report, we tested a male rat, a female rat, a male mouse, and a female mouse. We put them in a box and saw how long it took each of them to find the cottage cheese.
Have you ever wondered which rodent is smarter, a rat or a mouse? Well, in this report that is exactly what we tested. We took a female rat named Gooey, a male rat named Bandit, a female mouse named Speckles, and a male mouse named Coffee & Cream and tested to see which rodent would find the cottage cheese faster.
Problem Statement
Which gender of a rodent is smarter, a female rat, a male rat, a female mouse, or a male mouse?
Hypothesis
The male mouse (Coffee & Cream) will find the cottage cheese faster than the female mouse, the female rat and the male rat.
Materials
Cardboard
Tape
Scissors
Animal Bedding
Stopwatch
Bandit (male rat)
Gooey (female rat)
Speckles (female mouse)
Coffee & Cream (male mouse)
Procedure
The first thing we did was cut out cardboard and made a box. Second, we put the animal bedding and the cottage cheese in the lower left hand corner of the box; next we tested the female mouse named Speckles. Then we tested the male mouse named Coffee & Cream. Then we tested them male rat named Bandit. Lastly, we tested the female rat named Gooey.
Data & Observation
Results
As you can see form the chart above, Bandit found the cottage cheese faster than the other rodents. Unlike the other rodents, Bandit ate most of the cottage cheese and the other rodents just ate a little bit of it. The other rodents sniffed around a lot before going to the cottage cheese, while Bandit went straight to it.
Conclusion
Our hypothesis, that said that Coffee & Cream (the male mouse) would find the cottage cheese faster, was incorrect. As it turned out, Bandit (the male rat) found the cottage cheese faster than the other rodents. We are not positive that Bandit is smarter than the other animals; he may just have been hungrier. From this experiment, we learned how to properly handle the rats and mice so that we would not harm them. We also learned that rats like cottage cheese more than mice.
At the end of our experiment, our hypothesis was proven wrong. We thought that the male mouse would find the cottage cheese first, but to our surprise, we found out that Bandit, the male rate found the cheese faster. This could mean that Bandit thinks quicker or that he has a better sense of smell than the other animals. Or, he should have just been more hungry than the other animals and therefore, he was in more of a hurry to get to the cheese. From this experiment, we were able to find out the likes and dislikes of the rats and mice and we found out that Bandit was the only one who liked the cottage cheese.
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