What do farmers learn from the experiments, for example an insect zoo?
PETER: The insect zoo experiment is trying to uncover what is the ecological role of a kind of insect. A classic example of insect zoo would have three cages. One of them will be a plant by itself to see how the plant grows. In the second cage, you have a plant plus plant-eating insects, in principal bad guy bugs. In the third cage bad guy bugs and good guy bugs, which are spiders or predacious sucking bugs, in order to see what’s the outcome. It can be sixty, seventy, centimeters tall, pulled with the mud out of the field, and plunked in a pot. Sometimes we put the cages straight into the mud in the field and mark them off. The point is to get rid of all the bugs first before you cage it. And then put in a measured number of bugs. All this comes from the field. You’re investigating what you find in the field. Then you put in bugs that you are pretty sure are going to eat the plant and you can watch what happens. You may get an idea of what the insect eats. You may also get an idea of
