Ectothermic Metabolism Essay

Submitted By Dahmarien
Words: 788
Pages: 4

Dahmarien Carter
Biology 100-07
ALLELOPATHY
INTRODUCTION Plant allelopathy is all around us; however a lot of people don’t know what it is. Allelopathy in a nut shell is chemical warfare between plants. Plants do this by creating chemicals that inhibit the germination and growth of neighboring plants. In a discussion with my Professor before the lab he talked about how we can notice and spot when a plants is allelopathic. In last week’s lab all the groups exposed seeds to two different types of plants, in order to determine if the plants are allelopathic or not. So, if we exposed seeds to two different species of plants, then we will be able to determine if they are allelopathic based on comparison with the controlled petri dish that contains water only.

MATERIALS & METHODS The first step my group performed was to choose two different species of plants. Which were Pittosporum (Pittosporum sp) and Jaccaranda (Jaccaranda mimosifolia). Then we had to weigh out 10 grams of leaves from each plant chosen. After we weighed the plants, we placed the pittosporum into the blender. Next we added 100 ml of deionized water to the blender and blended the pittosporum and water for about 7 seconds. Then we placed folded cheese cloth into a funnel and placed it into a stock bottle. From there we poured the blended mixture through the funnel to filter the solution. We then placed 3 pieces of filter paper into a petri dish and added 10 ml of the filtered solution so it soaks the filter papers. Next we then carefully counted 20 radish seeds (Raphaus sativus) and placed them on top of the three layer of filter paper. In addition, we added another filter paper on top of the seeds in the petri dish. We copied the previous steps the same way for the Jaccaranda plant. We then worked with a controlled petri dish the exact same way, but with only water instead of the solution. We then waited a 1 week germination period at room temperature. After we came back a week later we then counted the length of the seed growth and wrote in on a lab data worksheet for all seeds. We did this by using tweezers and a ruler. Finally our last step of the experiment was to clean up, we threw away all of the petri dishes including the seeds.
RESULTS
When we came back to class after a week passed. My group and I immediately noticed the seeds growth in the petri dish. What caught my attention the most was how some seeds grew, but others didn’t. For instance, for the Pittosporum leaves tested more than half of the seeds didn’t grow at all. For the seeds that did grow their average length was 9.55 mm long. For the Jacarranda leaves the average length of the seeds after the germination period was 13 mm long. Although these numbers are somewhat close together the controlled petri seeds, on the other hand averaged 64.45 mm. This is a vast difference in length between the three recorded tests. The controlled