Great write-up! Here are some ideas to think about.

Expectations: Can you be more specific with the logical steps between light and floating or sinking? What gas is used up in photosynthesis? (Hint: what did you put in the water?) What gas is produced during photosynthesis? How does each gas affect whether the leaf sinks or floats? Does that depend on the gas's solubility in water?

Bonus: When a plant wants to use up the sugars made from photosynthesis, what process does it use, and which gases are used up or produced? Does this second process happen in the dark, the light, or both?

Data table: What are the units for your light and dark columns? How might you graph these data?

Lexi, great question! There are three main reasons. The first is that a basic question in biology is how do organisms in a mutualism (like pollination, where both species benefit) communicate? How does the plant advertise its food reward (the nectar) in a way that only the right insect can find it at the right time? Many flowering plants use color and shape to do this, but we know that pollinators are very good at detecting and choosing between smells as well. The second goal is to find out how these communication systems evolved over time. In the group that I study, there are over thirty plant species that evolved from a single ancestor that colonized the islands about 4 million years ago. If we know how each species looks (and smells) today, and which pollinators they use, we can start to piece together how they might have smelled in the past! The third reason is that due to habitat loss and invasive species (think non-native mammals like pigs and rats), these plants need a lot of conservation help. But, in order to restore the plant populations to what they once were, we need to also restore the right pollinators so that the plants can reproduce. Largely because no one wanted to stay in the forest at night, we know next to nothing about which nocturnal pollinators come to which plant species. That will be my job for the next few years!

Keep me updated on how your project is going - and keep in mind Kate's question for when something goes wrong!

Hi Lexi, Hannah, and Gage,

It's great to meet you all, and thank you for the questions. I am writing this from inside the University of California-Irvine greenhouse, where I have been working on measuring the smells of some Hawaiian plants. We think the smells are advertising to a nocturnal moth that pollinates the flowers. We just found out that the plants smell stronger at night compared to the daytime, which supports our hypothesis.

A bit of background on my academic path. I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for my undergraduate, with majors in chemistry and biology. It is a large public university and I chose it partly because they offered me a cool service-learning scholarship, but mostly because I admired the people I met there while I was visiting. I also knew that I could do undergrad research there, which is something I had been wanting to do since high school. While I was there I did field research on alpine plants at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of hiking. You can check out some of my other research on my website.

So why did I become a scientist? There are many reasons but it boils down to curiosity about how things work, and the rewards of teaching others. As long as I keep those in mind I feel like I am doing good work as a scientist.

Looking forward to working with ya'll on this project!

John