Research Page for The Bush School, Team 6
RED CLOVER

4/22/05 3:14PM - T6: First upload of our journal is complete.
We noticed that the clover seeds come in variety of colors. Why does this happen? Is the color important to growth rate, health, or any other characteristics of the adult plant? Does the cotyledon store food in every kind of seed? We have noticed that the root of the plant seems to always grow first. Is this always the case? How does red clover put more nitrogen in the soil?
Day 2 The roots have started to grow and are about 5 mm long. The seeds are germinating. We were correct that the root grows first in red clover. Is\Are there any circumstances under which the shoot would grow first? Why are the roots white even though they are above ground and could photosynthesize? Are the plants producing nitrogen yet and if not when do they start? Does the size of the seed affect how big the plant will get when it is an adult? Does the environment affect how big the plant will get?
4/24/05 5:18PM - Dr. Beverly Brown: You've got some great questions here! I'll look forward to seeing what you find out.
4/25/05 3:11PM - T6(Timothy) Response to Dr. Brown: Journal updated. We had more questions as a team. Our first question is: are the green waxy looking things on top of the sprouts actually leaves or are they cotyledons which have turned green? Why do the stems curl? Is it because they are trying to reach more light? Will the roots still grow down even though the plants are not in dirt? Do the plants grow as well out of dirt as they do when they are planted?
4/27/05 1:46PM - T6(Timothy): Journal updated and see figures below in research information.
4/28/05 11:44PM - Dr. C. Hemingway: Team 6, I am impressed with your work. Isn't it fascinating that the clover seeds did not differ in any anatomical feature, but differed in color. Your careful observation of your clover seeds at the initial stage of this project led to you some very interesting findings. Your interpretation regarding the yellow seeds sounds reasonable. What could explain the shorter growth and germination success of the gray seeds? Did any other teams in your class notice color variation in their seeds?
4/29/05 9:17AM - Dr. Marsh Sundberg: I've been looking at your data and need a little bit of help. On the germination experiment it looks like you did one trial for each color of seed with different numbers of seeds for each color. Correct? But I'm not sure what the trials were for the root length table. Is each trial a single plant that was measured from that jar? I assume that these were the same seeds reported on in the germination experiment. If so, that would explain why only 4 trials for the grey seeds, but why only 4 for purple and yellow? Are you continuing to collect data on this batch of seeds (if so, how long do you plan to grow them) or have you terminated this experiment?
4/29/05 1:32PM - T6 Response to Dr. Sundberg: Thankyou for your comments. We realized that measuring only four seeds from each batch makes no sense, so we have started to measure all the seeds of each color in order to make our averages more accurate. We hope this clears up any problems you had with our data. We had been having some problems with seeds getting washed over the dividers in the container and mixing with other colors, but we have made sure to use less water to stop that from happening again. Many of the seeds are dying; their roots aren't well attatched to the seeds and we see loose roots and seed tops rloating around daily. This is changing our seed numbers drastically. The yellow seeds still have much longer roots and shoots but the purple ones are catching up in length very rapidly. This could mean that we were wrong to think that the seeds turn yellow when they are the closest to germinating, or perhaps the purple ones grow extra fast.
5/2/05 2:44PM - T6(Timothy): Our seeds died over the weekend due to lack of water. We are starting our experiment over to see what would have happened had the seeds not died. We are making some changes to make the experiment to make it more accurate. One change is we will have all the different colors of seeds have the same number of seeds. This should make our data more accurate. Another change is that we putting our seeds in separate Petri dishes. This is because last time he had some trouble keeping seeds in the right section of the Petri dish.
5/2/05 2:23PM - Dr. Jeffery Osborn: I'm impressed with your observations and the questions you have developed. You mention that you are having trouble because many of your seeds are dying. Are seeds of each color dying approximately in equal numbers, or is one color more viable than the others? Do you think that the seeds are dying due to some aspect of the experimental design, or is this unrelated?
5/4/05 1:26PM - T6 Response to Dr. Osborn: The seeds in our team dyed entirely due to the lack of water. It was a mistake at the fault of multiple people. It seems that all the seeds dyed at the approximately the same time, though we don’t know exactly if some colors dyed first, since it happened at night. Today we saw that we were wrong in our educated guess that the yellow seeds germinated first. The grey seeds seem to be the longest in size though there are more yellow ones. We don’t really know what this implies about the germination order, but we think it means that the grey seeds germinated first and the yellow ones germinated more prolifically. The average seeds length was 6.2mm for grey and 4.07mm for yellow. The other ones were Brown- 4.75mm purple- 7.08mm. But 14/15 yellow seeds germinated, 10/15 grey seeds germinated, 10/15 brown seeds germinated and 13/15 purple seeds germinated. Not many have died though-only one for all four of the colors.
5/4/05 4:29PM - PEER COMMENT from Bush Team 7 (Aaron): I read your stuff and I still cant figure out why the are different colors. Could it be a DNA thing or a photosynthesis thing? It is very puzzling to me. I hope you figure out why it does that.
5/5/05 11:07AM - PEER COMMENT from Bush Team 9: Team 6- This is an interesting experiment. In the beginning, did you have a hypothesis about which seeds would do the best or germinate first? Do you think that this is mainly coincidence or that there is a real difference between the colors that leads to changing growth rates?