Blake takes pleasure in playing the piano and saxophone, composing music, and creating pencil drawings. He also likes to play soccer, tennis, and basketball. Blake's sixth grade science teacher is his mentor because "she recognized my scientific ability and helped to expand it." Someday Blake would like to become an environmentally friendly architect. "I would like design environmentally friendly houses. This would allow me to use both my artistic skills and scientific knowledge," Blake explains.
The omnipresent plague of fire ants in Blake's yard pestered his family to no end. His parents do not like pesticides, so they have tried soap, citrus oils, and other organic products to eliminate the fire ants—but they have had little success. He wanted to test commercial fire ant baits as an alternative.
Blake first plotted three similar fields of 1/8 acre each and counted the baseline number of fire ants. He placed index cards with peanut butter 2 feet from each ant mound, then collected the cards, froze them, and counted the ants. He then used one field as a control, another to test the ant killer Zep, and the third to test the ant killer Amdro. He counted any populations weekly in each field. He found that the commercial pesticides temporarily decreased ant populations. But by the end of week four, ant populations had returned to baseline values. The original, treated ant mounds were empty, but new mounds had sprung up.
