Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My science fair question is: Does the average human like what they eat better because they eat it a lot or because it tastes better? I am using mice for my to answer my question. I wanted to know what would be a good food to feed the mice that they don't really like or that i could add to there food.

In my experience, animals typically don't like to eat pellet foods as much as they like seed mixes, even though the pellet foods are more balanced in terms of nutrition. I found a good website on feeding mice here: http://exoticpets.about.com/cs/careofmi ... care_3.htm if you're interested.

Keep in mind that for many science fairs you will need special permission if you are going to work with live animals--be sure to ask your teacher about your project and what permissions you will need as soon as possible.

I think you should reconsider your question. What does 'taste better' really mean? How would you judge that in humans, let alone mice? Food choice is the result of a complex set of factors including nutrition, what is available to the animal (or what they think will be available in the future), and reproductive status.

Do you have different mice? Any of them reproducing? You could use 'cafeteria' style experiments to see what their favorite foods are and compare between reproductive and non-reproductive animals.
Roland

Hi!
Your question seems really interesting, but perhaps it may be a little broad. I would suggest you try to narrow it down a little bit so that you can minimize the amount of variables that you are testing. Keep in mind that "taste", like Roland said, is not a fixed property that can be simply measured. It might be also hard to determine whether the mice feels that something tastes good, or something had tastes bad. Melissa's point about permission is also extremely important, most science fairs require prior approval and signatures before the use of live animals in experiments, especially if you yourself are working with them and altering their natural environment and food intake. It might also be helpful to think about how you will generalize the results in mice to possible results in humans. Hope this helped, best of luck!