OOPs I originally commented this to myself!

I guess I will get the hang of this, Im a bit of a technophobe in some ways. Thanks for the comments! Well, encapsulation is an immune response from the caterpillar that is triggered by the presence of a foreign object in the body. The way some caterpillars respond is by surrounding the object with layers of cells that eventually harden and melanize, therefore preventing the parasitoid from developing. So, the prediction is that caterpillars fed toxic diets are less able to encapsulate the eggs, which beneifts the parasitoid by allowing it to develop. This is PhD dissertation research by someone in the lab whom I helped over the summer. So, we are still waiting to find out the results. For the feeding effeciency part, the data will be analyzed using ANOVA and ANCOVA and to examine whether the diets had any affect on pupal weight. So the data set is basically the replicates (caterpillars), the treatments, (different toxins)and initial caterpillar and pupal weights. We will use ANOVA to test for differences between the treatments and ANCOVA to remove any nusicance effects differences in the inital starting weights on the final pupal weights. For the encapsulation data, which hopefully some of it will be done by the end of semester. We will dissect the caterpillars and measure the degree of melanisation using imaging software. This will provide a measurement based on the color, called an r value. The stats test would then be an ANOVA to test for differences in the r values between treatments....well these are my thoughts so far, who knows what other stats may creep in there!!