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A Study On The Respiratory Exchange Essay

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Abstract

The characteristics of the phylum, Arthropoda, includes jointed legs and an exoskeleton (Freeman, 2014). The insect the team and I chose to work on were the hissing cockroaches, Gromphadorhina portentosa. Hissing cockroaches are small ectothermic animals and are known to have a tracheal system (Burnaford) that allows them to transfer oxygen into their body. Introduction
The organism used in the experiment is a hissing cockroach and the main reason was that cockroaches are arthropods that have a trachea in which is almost similar to humans. Although humans have a trachea which is more of a “wind pipe” structure whereas insects have a tracheae in which is more of a network of air tubes (Bartrim, 2014). The tracheal system has the capacity to transport oxygen and carbon dioxide (Heinrich, 2013) in which the series of branched tubes help deliver oxygen from the environment to the cells (Burnaford, 2016). The respiratory exchange is regulated by the spiracles and this creates three phases of gas exchange (Bartrim, 2014); continuous, cyclic, and discontinuous. The most distinct phase is the discontinuous gas exchange cycle (DGC) because it’s the phase that insects must deal with (Heinrich, 2014). The DGC has its own three phases; closed phase, open phase, and the flutter phase (Heinrich, 2014).
The hypothesis we had was that the mass of the insect correlates towards respiration. The more mass it has the higher respiration. The dependent variable is the mass of the

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