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Interactions Between Organisms

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Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with each other and their environment. There are many different types of interactions that can take place in which some organisms benefit and some are harmed. One example of an interaction between organisms where both organisms benefit is mutualism. An example of mutualism takes place between a honeybee and a flower. When a bee lands on a flower it positively benefits by eating the nectar. Then, when it lands on another flower, the pollen from the first flower is transferred to the next flower to help the plant reproduce. Alternatively of mutualism is another type of interaction called competition. In this case, both organisms are negatively affected.
During this experiment, we investigated the …show more content…

The twenty-five tomato plants had an average height of 164.6 mm while the average height of twenty five tomato plants planted with twenty five oat plans was 97.0 mm. When comparing these data points, they produced a t-score of 7.689 and a p-value of 0.000. In comparing the interspecific competition affect on weight, the twenty-five tomato plants had an average weight of 1067.9 milligrams compared to the twenty-five tomato plants also grown with twenty-five oat plants that had an average weight of only 270.5 milligrams. When comparing these data points, they produced a t-score of 7.745 and a p-value of 0.000. Since the p-values are both less than .05, at an alpha level of .05 or less, we can reject the null hypothesis that both height and weight were the same in interspecific competition cases. This means we can accept the alternative hypothesis that interspecific competition affects height and …show more content…

Both height and weight of the tomato plant are negatively affected when more plants are grown in the same amount of space. This increase in plant density causes increased intraspecific competition between plants for limited resources. As a result, these tomato plants grow less tall and weigh less. These plants could be competing for nutrients in the soil. Liu et al. (2016) found that nitrogen in the soil, in the form of either NH4+ or NO3-, is often highly competed for among plants and other organisms. Inn addition, Pankoke et al. (2015) found nitrogen competition to have the biggest affect on plant biomass. Data from Liu et al. (2016) discovered a natural solution that plants and organisms have adapted to help with this competition over nitrogen in the soil. It was concluded that some organisms and plants would absorb the nitrogen from different soil depths. Plants acquire nearly seventy percent of their nitrogen from the top five centimeters of the soil. As a result, more nitrogen is available deeper in the soil for organisms. The issue in intraspecific competition is that all of the plants are the same species, and therefore have the same roots to draw nitrogen from the same depth of soil. When more plants are added to the same amount of soil, there are more roots competing at the same depth for limited about of nitrogen in the

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