We were asked to divide ourselves into groups of four students, and our group consisted of me and my roommate and two other friends who were roommates as well, so we decided to keep the tray in our rooms in the alternate weeks. We were given 2 plastic trays, one was the rearing tray were the worms lived and the other was for water, the water tray was a slightly bigger tray, where we placed a stone in the middle and kept the smaller rearing tray on top like an island, this solved two purposes,
1. To protect the worms from ants
2. To maintain a slightly cooler
temperature as the climate was really hot then
And we were
also given a sponge which was supposed to be wet, which is again to maintain
the temperature. And finally the protagonist worms called black ants during
that stage…we were given some 200 black ants each, they must be some two days’
old.
Initially we
were asked to feed only 2 mulberry leaves that too finely chopped to facilitate
the chewing, as the mouthparts of those worms were very small per meal and this
was to be carried out. We were slowly to increase the number pf leaves
gradually based on the requirement and there was literally a point when we had
to feed 5 leaves every two hours.
So the
assignment was to rear the silkworm, extract silk out of half the worms we rear
and we were supposed to let the other half grow and transform into moth and
mate to start a whole new life cycle…but we could achieve only the first half
of the assignment.
Stay tuned
and read through the whole series to know my experience.
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