Bio Experiment : Comparing Rate of respiration in mealworms at different temperatures?

Question

Mealworms are cold-blooded animals and are unable to maintain a constant core temperature, hence respiration would therefore change with temperature. As glucose is oxidised, oxygen is used up and carbon dioxide and heat energy is produced. Increment in temperature / production of CO2 or O2 consumption would hence be good indicators for the experiment.

1) Hypothesis

[What other statements can I make, other the ones they mentioned about in the preview of the experiment?]

2) Procedures

a) Weigh a mealworm and record its mass (0.61g).

b) Set-up: Put 5 NaOH pellets into an Eppendorf tube. Place in inverted into a testtube. Place a layer of netting over it. Put the mealworm into the test tube. Put into water bath. Make sure that water level is higher than worms can reach. Set up respirometer and connect to test tube when temp. stabilises.

c) Record original volume reading of water in syringe, then every minute, record, the rate of decrement.

d) Calculate rate of O2 consumption

Answer 1

The NaOH pellets absorb the CO2 out of the air. If you have an accurate enough balance then you _might_ be able to weigh the pellets before and after and say how much CO2 was absorbed.

Since mealworms don't respire very fast I wonder how long the experiment is planned to take to finish? Then you could say that X grams of O2 were used in Y hours to produce Z grams of CO2 by W grams of mealworm.