Blog #9

It's time for the genetics unit! Mary, Sosie, and I selected albino corn for our experiment. We are very excited to order and receive our dihybrid albino corn seeds so we can get started.

Some background information: the purpose of this experiment is to test the phenotype of a fast plant. A phenotype is the physical characteristics of an organism, as influenced by genes. A gene is a unit of heredity that is passed on from generation to generation and is responsible for the DNA makeup of offspring. In this research project we are choosing an environmental variable that influences the phenotype of an organism.

The variable we decided to test is fertilizer. We are  going to focus on how the amount of nitrogen in the fertilizer and see how it affects the growth and color of the corn. Albinism in corn is a genetic mutation so it is hard to tell if the seeds are going to be albino or regular until they are growing, so we will not know how they turn out until we start the experiment. We haven't yet come up with a hypothesis, as we are still coming up with details about the design of the experiment.

Blog Post #8

I collaborated with Theresa on research of the evolution of dolphin's social groups, which are called pods.
We hypothesized that all dolphin species would live in relatively large groups consisting of hundreds of individuals. We found an evolutionary tree and modified it to trace the specific trait we were studying. This tree portrays the ancestry of the families Delphinidae and Globicephala. Here is the modified version of our cladogram:

The cladogram indicates different sizes of pods with each color dots. The red dots represent large pods (100-1000), blue represents medium sized pods (20-100), and green represents the smallest pods comprised of 2-20 individuals. This information shows that dolphins can really live in any size pods. They can even be based on environmental factors, such as food availability and predators in the area.

We were able to conclude that the research we conducted rejects our hypothesis. This is because there are an array of pod sizes within each genus, and even within each species of dolphins. Our hypothesis is partially true but it is much too narrow to categorize all dolphin pods as one relative size, when the size can be anywhere along a spectrum.