Hi Byung, Catherine,and Grace,

I just thought of this, and it might help with your salinity trial. You could record the amount of salt you add to the water. If you have a couple of treatments you might be able to see that adding more salt has a bigger effect than less salt, which might have a bigger effect that adding no salt. Just a thought.

I'm excited to see your results!

Best,

Alex

Hi Alex! 

Thank you so much for replying to us and giving us all of that information. Knowing how big of an effect we will see with each lab really helped us to decide which one to go with. We are planning on testing the effects of salinity on the C-Ferns. We will have the best access to materials for testing salinity so this will be the best lab for us to do. Thanks again! We are looking forward to keeping you updated throughout the lab. 

Best, 

Grace, Catherine, and Byung

Hi Grace, Byung, and Catherine!

Wow, those pictures of the sporophytes look really. You actually inspired me to try and grow my own C-fern in my lab!

I think any of your treatments would be fine to use, but I think there are some pros and cons of each one that I see that could guide you.

Light: ferns grow pretty well in low light conditions, so if you picked light as your treatment and you want to see an effect, could could try for very high light vs very normal light.

Temperature: This one would be really easy to manipulate. You could put some of them in the fridge to make them cold. Most ferns are sort of tropical so I bet you would see a strong change.

Salinity: This would be a good one too, but I would make sure to add a lot of salt so that you see an effect. Lots of times people are afraid of killing the plant and then they don't add enough salt to see an effect.

Precipitation: This one wouldn't be as hard as you think. You could just control the amount of water you give the plants and call that precipitation. I don't think this one would give the most noticeable effect though. 

Overall, I think any of them would work fine, but the easiest ones to do would be temperature or salinity.

Does that help? What do you think?

Best,

Alex

Hi Alex! 

We fertilized our female gametophytes a little over a week ago, and we now have four C-Fern sporophytes developing in our Petri dish! I am going to upload some of those pictures on here in a minute.

We now need to design an experiment in which we choose one condition and test its effect on the growth of our sporophytes. Right now we have four conditions which we are considering testing, but we need to decide on one, and we were hoping that you could help us make up our minds. We are thinking about investigating either light, temperature, salinity, or precipitation (not quite sure how to go about this one).

Do any of these four variables sound more interesting or doable to investigate to you? 

Thanks!

Grace, Catherine, and Byung

Ohhh C-ferns are pretty cool. I'm excited now!

C-ferns are fun because they grow from a single cell into a whole fern pretty quickly. They also have some pretty strange traits that animals don't have!

I've never grown C-ferns myself, but I'm excited to see your photos of it.

Best,

Alex

Hi Alex!

We're seniors and AP Bio students from New Jersey, and we're excited to learn more about plants! We're not sure exactly what our project is going to be on, but we're going to be studying C-Ferns, if there's anything you can tell us about those? 

None of us will be able to talk in German with you, but we're looking forward to working on this project together!!

-Catherine, Grace, and Byung