How to measure the rate of respiration in mealworm beetles?

Answer 1

The easiest way would probably be to measure the rate of formation of CO2 in a hermetically sealed chamber, subtract the rate of a similar chamber but without bugs (the substrate might produce some CO2 on it s own by microbial activity) and divide that by the number of mealworms present. Not a simple experiment to do at home, but not completely impossible either. Throw 100 mealworms in a bottle, no substrate, flush the bottle with CO2-free air (made by passing it through a CaOH solution first), then at T=0 use the outflowing air to precipitate CaCO3 in another bottle of CaOH solution, let it run for an hour, and weigh the resulting precipitate of CaCO3 after filtering and drying. Convert moles CaCO3 to CO2, divide result by 100 and you have the production of CO2 by 1 mealworm in an hour.