The Nora Notebooks, Book 1: The Trouble with Ants by Mills Claudia

Author:Mills, Claudia [Mills, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780385391610
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2015-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

He paused for effect.

“Figure skating! Ice skating! Doing fancy twirls and leaps and stuff on the ice!”

Nora couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. Brody doubled over, laughing, too.

Dog came up, panting, a ball in his mouth.

“At least Dog doesn’t think it’s funny,” Mason said.

But Dog did look as if he were grinning as he dropped the ball at Mason’s feet.

“If only,” Mason said, “I could find a way to persuade my parents to stop trying to persuade me to do things!”

Monday evening, Nora’s mother was off listening to an astronomy talk at the university, so Nora and her father were home all by themselves. All by themselves, except for her ants.

“I’m going to work on my ant experiments,” Nora told her father as they cleared away the dishes after dinner.

“Do you need any help?” he asked.

“No!” Nora hadn’t meant to sound so fierce, but it was one thing to have a footnote thanking Professor Neil Alpers for suggesting her line of research. It would be quite another thing if she had to thank Prof. Neil Alpers for helping with the research itself.

“Okay, sweetie” was all her father said. “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

Nora had already cut a large sheet from a huge roll of butcher paper stored in the attic. She thought her ants would be more comfortable walking across paper than across the slippery, cold, bare bathtub. Now she laid the paper in the bottom of the tub, measured a square in the middle of it, and marked the square with bright blue chalk.

Gently, she extricated a dozen ants from her farm. Those would be enough ants to start with. She placed them in the middle of the square and set a small piece of cracker outside the square. Then she set the stopwatch on the tablet she had borrowed from her father.

The ants walked about. In two minutes and twenty-three seconds, the first ant reached the chalk line on one edge of the square, the edge farthest from the cracker.

Then the ant stopped.

Another ant followed her. (Nora knew they were both female ants, because all worker ants are females.)

That ant stopped, too.

Nora stared. Ants didn’t seem to want to cross a line made of chalk! How could they even know there was a line there? Why would they care? They must have smelled the chalk or felt the chalk dust with their feet.

As Nora continued to watch, two other ants stopped short their wanderings at a different edge of the square, also reluctant to walk across the chalk line.

She drew in her breath. This was a pattern! This was a real, observable, scientific result!

But three other ants, which had reached the edge of the chalk square closest to the cracker, hesitated, and then did cross over the line, taking a direct path to the cracker.

Ants were willing to cross the chalk line if there was food on the other side!

Wishing she had remembered to bring her parents’ video camera up to the bathroom, Nora contented herself with watching and timing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.