Little is known about tadpole social behavior. It was observed that X. laevis tadpoles, when separated from a group, ceased feeding and swimming and appeared to freeze. I was curious to see how many tadpoles it took for small populations to behave “normally.” Same-batch tadpoles were raised in groups of 5 using protocol from the Whittemore lab. On day 10, tadpoles were randomly assigned to petri dishes with populations ranging from 1 to 10; with 10 serving as the control. Replicate dishes were filmed for 3 minutes following a 1 minute acclimation. Video analysis using idTrackerÓ software yielded data about the percent movement per population. PythonÒ was utilized to compare percent movement for each of the population sizes and to perform statistical analysis. Due to the small number of replicates, outliers skewed the data, but there is a positive trend that shows larger populations move more than smaller populations.
