So my daughter (1st grade) decided to do her science fair project using our new chicks (5 weeks old).
Every morning before school we put 4 different colored cups filled with 140grams of food each in a row.
When she got home from school, we took them out and weighed them to see how much from each cup they ate.
To try and negate the effect of position skewing the results, we changed the position each color of cup was in each day.
Her hypothesis was that they would eat more out of red because they like worms and strawberries so it must be a color they like (We're in first grade here, so we didn't get too deep into the spectrum and poultry eye-sight
)
What we found was that while they did seem to favor red or green over white and blue, that the numbers weren't statistically significant.
This was also a good lesson in science -
Even "no conclusive results" can yield useful data (AKA: Don't worry about the color of your feeder, chickens don't care.)
Since we moved and tracked the position of the cups each day, we could also draw some data from cup position as well.
Same conclusion: They seemed to favor the outside cups (Position #1 and #4), but the results were statistically insignificant.
(AKA: Don't worry about where the food is, just so long as they can find it!)
I whipped up some Excel charts for her display just for kicks:
Every morning before school we put 4 different colored cups filled with 140grams of food each in a row.
When she got home from school, we took them out and weighed them to see how much from each cup they ate.
To try and negate the effect of position skewing the results, we changed the position each color of cup was in each day.
Her hypothesis was that they would eat more out of red because they like worms and strawberries so it must be a color they like (We're in first grade here, so we didn't get too deep into the spectrum and poultry eye-sight
)What we found was that while they did seem to favor red or green over white and blue, that the numbers weren't statistically significant.
This was also a good lesson in science -
Even "no conclusive results" can yield useful data (AKA: Don't worry about the color of your feeder, chickens don't care.)
Since we moved and tracked the position of the cups each day, we could also draw some data from cup position as well.
Same conclusion: They seemed to favor the outside cups (Position #1 and #4), but the results were statistically insignificant.
(AKA: Don't worry about where the food is, just so long as they can find it!)
I whipped up some Excel charts for her display just for kicks:
