Hi

The type of experiment depends on your question.

Multiple choice experiments will give your some insight of the relative attractiveness of the stimuli. Keep in mind that you may need more than one control depending the type of stimuli. This experiment may be a nightmare to set up, analyze and explain but could "more realistic"

Single choice experiments (Treat Vs Control) will answer, Is this treatment attractive?

Double choice (T1 Vs T2, T1 Vs T3, T1 Vs T4, T2 Vs T3 and so on) will test if the gravid females prefers any stimuli.

Hope it helps

Cheers

Alf

I think multiple choice test will be more suitable to check the preference of insect, you can keep more replication to find the best treatment of the experiment.

Dear Bernard,

It's really very relevant and obvious question you might be facing while designing your experiment but you haven't mentioned the name of experimenting insect (because stimuli responses for every ordered insects aren't same). Regarding this I would suggest, you should make decision following your objective requirement.

In addition, I would also like to mention that, for your experiments of oviposition preference of and gravid females insect, you have to deal with live and healthy insects (whatever the insect species you might be working), it's quiet toughest job indeed (with my personal research experiences !!!).

For live insects (or else any other living organisms too), every time responding towards same stimuli & producing same results can't be expected as it is well-drivened and affected by different factors too. In that situation, either single-choice or double-choice bioassays (with its replicates of each testing and comparing samples) supposed to be quiet tedious and might confused your expectations too.

Much importantly, multi-choiced bioassay has its significance in offering an environment for making natural preferences (more or less like in wild condition) to the testing insect species, owing realistic touch with satisfactory result to your experiment. Moreover, with the help of this you can have the observations for both i.e., single-choiced as well as multi-choiced to co-inluenced under same testing environment at a time.

Therefore, I would suggest you for the multi-choiced bioassay but, yes again follow your objective requirement first.

Best of Luck....!!!

CHEERS

AARTI