As an aside, it's rained like crazy here in San Diego for the last week and although the Polytburo did it's best to put a tarpolyn over Polytopia, everything ended up wet. Having said that, the dry potting soil had stayed dry for a few days after the release of the polies and we hypothesize that the polies crawled around for only a few hours before curling up and going dormant due to the cold weather.
In the end, the count was quite conclusive. She found 50 of the original 200, distributed thusly:
- Woodchips: 38
- Moist canyon soil: 10
- Moist potting soil: 1
- Dry potting soil: 1
As for the sub-preference of the canyon soil over the potting soil, I think that they chose it because of the decaying wood in the canyon soil. We collected that dirt in an area where workers had been cutting down scrub brush for fire prevention and there was plenty of finely ground wood mixed in with the soil.
That looks pretty conclusive, all right!
ReplyDeleteOf course, if she wants to go whole-hog on this, she could try making an estimate of the relative difficulty of finding roly-polies in the different substrates:
1. Get together four groups of, say, 20 roly-polies each
2. Mix one of the groups of 20 into about a gallon of the soil or woodchips to be tested.
3. See how many can be found immediately afterwards.
Although, I doubt it would turn out to be 10 times easier to find them in canyon soil than in potting soil, or over 30 times easier to find them in woodchips, so it probably isn't necessary to go overboard here.