Week 6 laboratory reflection - Plant Transpiration

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Indiana University, Bloomington *

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Biology

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Feb 20, 2024

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Name: Husanpreet Kaur Laboratory Reflection: Plant Transpiration (Part 1) Instructions: Make sure to scroll through the entire document to answer all questions. It would also help with grading if you put your typed answers in a different (but readable) color font . Save and upload your completed assignment to the associated assignment page on Canvas. It is the student’s responsibility to confirm that the correct file was submitted to Canvas by the due date. 1. (2pt) Based on what you have learned about plant transpiration, predict what might happen to the rate of transpiration if the number of leaves on a plant is reduced. What about if the number of stomata is reduced? Explain your reasoning. Based off what we learned about plant transpiration, if the number leaves on a plant is reduced, the rate of transpiration will decrease. This is because there would be less surface area for the exchange between water and gasses and it would mean that there would be less transpiration occurring from the roots and stomata. The number of leaves and the number of stomata is connected since the higher the number of leaves, or larger size of said leaves, the more stomata there are. So, less leaves or smaller leaves would mean that there is a lower number of stomata so the rate of transpiration would decrease. Because transpiration occurs through the stomata, transpiration wouldn’t occur because the stomata wouldn’t be able to send the water up stem. 2. In this week’s laboratory, you set up an experiment testing the effect of an environmental factor on transpiration rates in corn. a. (1pt) Describe your group’s hypothesis and predictions. Provide an explanation of your predictions (i.e. specifically, why do you expect to see these results?) To help you answer this question, you may wish to do some additional background research regarding the environmental condition your group manipulated. Our group’s hypothesis was that an increased exposure to light will lead to a lower transpiration rate. Our prediction is that an increased exposure to light will cause the stomata to close, which means that there will be less transpiration. b. (1pt) Why is it important to have more than one plant in each treatment? 1

It is important to have more than one plant in each treatment because testing the hypothesis more than once can help in concluding the hypothesis, if the experiment is replicated, and the results are similar almost every time this can help in verifying whether the prediction and hypothesis can be confirmed as true or not. c. (2pt) Describe at least two factors in your experimental design that you controlled for. Why is it important to control for all factors except for the factor that you have manipulated? Two factors that we controlled in our experiment were number of plants we would be testing (8 plants in total; 4 in sunlight, 4 in the shade), and we also controlled the amount of time the plants would be placed in their specific conditions. It’s important to control all factors except the ones being manipulated because the influence of other factor can lead to false results or skewed results due to the influence of an unknown variable. For example, if the duration of sunlight provided to all the different plants varied then this could lead to skewed data as the difference in time could be a bigger influence on the plants instead of the variable that are being tested, the light vs the dark. d. (1pt) In your experiment, what is the purpose of placing the parafilm over the conical tube? The purpose of placing the parafilm is so that the water that evaporates doesn’t interfere with data, because it would give the plants less water to soak if it did evaporates, and we want the water to stay in the container even if it does end up evaporating. 3. (3pts) Create a graph of your predicted results and insert it below. This can be a picture of a hand-drawn graph or a computer-generated graph. Your graph should include a brief figure caption describing the figure and the experimental design used for the data presented. Make sure to label your axes! (Note: This will be good practice, as you will need to construct a graph of your actual results in next week’s post-lab reflection). 2

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