I don’t know if you ever played the board game ”hungry hungry hippos” as a child but it was one of my favorites to play during free time in primary school and I was reminded of that during my research this week. The object of the games is to get your hippo to eat more marbles than anyone else. This week I have been mainly focused on my leaf dish experiments where I place eggs of the red spider mites on a leaf, placed on a sponge soaked in water. I have a leaf with 5, 10, 15, 20,25 and 30 eggs and I repeat these 5 times and once I have them all set up with the correct number of eggs I place one adult female predatory mite on each. Now this is where ”hungry hungry hippos” comes in. The predatory mites have been starved for 24 hours and once placed on the dish they begin to feast. My field supervisor here speaks very little English and our main forms of communication are hand gestures, sound effects and google translate. So earlier in the week during our first round of this experiment he pointed at his stomach, pointed at the dish and said ”hungry hungry”. I couldn’t help but think of the board game I loved so much when I was younger, watching the mites scurry around the dishes eating as many eggs as they can. I nearly find myself rooting for predatory mites as I watch under the microscope I am already looking forward to repeating this experiment with different life stages of the red spider mites.
