Info
| Explore | We know that many different environments affect a plant's growth and the quality of the overall plant. What we have discovered in class was that many different aspect go into the health of a plant. Our background research showed us that by having insects in the soil of our plant helps to aerate... |
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| Research Question | We want to know how different insects can affect the health and growth of a plant. We came up with this question by thinking of what can be found in a garden. Insects and animals affect plant growth and health. We know that insects can help to aerate and fertilize soil, thus helping with plant... |
| Predictions | The possible outcomes of our studies is that the insects may affect the plants in a negative way by affecting the plants life to decline due to the insects impact. Another outcome is that the plant may be affected positively by the insects impact and gain nutrition. The last outcome is that the... |
| Experimental Design | We are using 9 different experiments. 3 pots for each of the different scenarios. All of the pots have the same amount of potting soil and 20 germinated seeds in each. In 3 of the pots there will be 14 mealworms. In another 3 of the pots there will be 3 earth worms included too. In the last 3... |
| Conclusion | Concluding our experiment, the average height of our none plants was 3.166 cm, earthworm average was 3.833 cm, and mealworm was 0.333 cm. There were 10 deaths of the earthworms (when we were cleaning our pots out we only found the alive worms, we think that they either escaped or decomposed). ... |
| About this Project |
This student group came up with a very interesting idea to study the interaction between invertebrates and their plant growth. They used earthworms and mealworms to test the interaction they might have on plants. This group was detailed in their set up and extremely organized in how they... |
Updates
It looks like the problem is resolved and everything should be back to normal. Please feel free to resume posting, and do let us know if you experience any issues posting to your projects.
Hello Liming,
Thank you for helping us through our project! Our project results were that the mealworm's had affected our alfalfa seeds very negatively. The earthworms had little to no effect on our plants, although our results showed that there was a slight increase with the earthworm growth. The amount of growth was not a significant amount. The plants with no insects had heights slightly shorter than the earthworm heights. There was a significant amount of mealworm deaths. The more of the mealworms that there were the worse the plant health and growth was. There were only a few of the earthworms that had passed, we could not find them at the end of our study so we assumed they decomposed.
Thank you so much for being our mentor! It was great while it lasted
Sincerely, Nicole, Anna, and Jessica
Hello everyone!
We are aware of some technical issues with the platform, leading to an issue with posting to project pages and issues with users' dashboards. We are working diligently with our developer to resolve them as quickly as possible. Please be patient and keep checking your projects so you can post your hellos, updates, reports, thank-yous, and goodbyes.
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We are finally getting to see the insects affect on the plant health. The pots with the earth worms are growing with the best height and really good plant health. The pots with the mealworms are in a very poor condition. The plants are not at very short heights and the health of the plants is getting worse. The pots with no insects at all are doing well with their good growing rate and good plant health.
Hello, our plants are growing really well. We noticed that since yesterday our plants have had no growth. The mealworms have crushed most of the plants from crawling on them. The earth worm plants are doing good. The plants with no insects are doing well too.
We had germinated our seeds on Friday and today we had planted our germinated seeds into soil.
Hi Nicole,
That is very exciting! I love your idea of comparing the impact of different insect species. I look forward to the experiment.
Liming
Hello Liming,
We are back from spring break today and we will be setting up our project this week.
Hi Jessica,
Thanks for uploading the file. I will take a look later today and send back any comments. I am excited for you!
Hey Liming, I just uploaded our research proposal and I was wondering if you could take a look at it and give us some feedback?
Hi Jessica,
These are excellent questions. Keep in mind that you will need to design controlled experiments to test these ideas. For example, when testing for the impact of insect herbivory, what insect will you use? and at which growth stage will you introduce the insects? To me, controlling water temperature is more difficult because the water temperature can change with the environment temperature. It is easier to manipulate pH than temperature I think.
Liming
Questions we liked:
- How do insects affect affect plant growth?
- How does different water temperatures affect plant growth?
- How does the different pH levels of water affect how many seeds germinate?
Hi Jessica and Nicole,
Nice to meet to you here. Jessica, it is quite impressive that you are involved in so many activities. I went to high school in China and we have loads of homework to do. I rarely have time for anything other than study. But I manage to find some time for bird watching then. So when you can, you should work hard on all of your talents, wherever they lead you.
Nicole, it is also so nice to meet you here as well! I do love animals a lot. But I need to stress here that plants are cool, too:) My favorite animal is sperm whale—it always strikes me that mammals can live in water so well.
Liming
My name is Jessica, I am currently in 11th grade. I am in SADD, BBBS, Student Council, and National Honor Society. Liming, what did you participate in for high school?
Hello! I am Nicole I am a junior at Medford High School. I like shopping and being outside. I am in SADD, Big Brothers Big Sisters and NHS. My favorite animal is cats. Liming, what is your favorite animal?
Welcome to a new session of PlantingScience! I am the liaison for this group, and my role is to facilitate the conversation between this group of students and your mentor (Liming) when it is needed. Other than being your liaison, I am a graduate student at California State University, Fresno (Fresno State). I’m studying how virtual field trips may influence how students may be interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). In the past, I have worked on plant projects too! I look forward to working with you all!
Best wishes,
---Tilly
Hi Anna,
I'm Liming. Nice to hear from you! I am now a postdoc at UC Riverside. I really like painting and drawing, especially portraits. I also like hiking. I hiked Torres del Paine in southern Chile around this time last year. It was really gorgeous!
Hi! My name is Anna and I'm a junior at Medford High School. I really like painting and drawing. I play basketball and I'm also in track. Liming Cai, what is your favorite thing to do in your free time?
Welcome to your PlantingScience project page!
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