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Intraspecific Competition Lab Report

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This experiment was performed to give a better idea of interspecific competition and intraspecific competition between radish seeds and wheat seeds at high and low densities. By planting two species only pots and two combined species pots our results showed that the radish seeds performed better at both interspecific and intraspecific competitions and concluded that the lower the pot density the more resources and growth. 32 radish seeds were evenly planted in pot A1 followed by 32 wheat seeds planted in pot A2 and 16 of each radish and wheat seeds combined (32 total) planted in pot AB1. We repeated this procedure again but this time planting 96 radish seeds evenly in pot A2, 96 wheat seeds in pot B2 and 48 of each radish and wheat seeds combined (96 …show more content…

For both interspecific and intraspecific competition the radish did its best however at the lowest density of 32. (Figure 1) These results did support our hypothesis that the lower the density the better the growth and the radish would thrive better at intraspecific competition however was refuted with us predicting that wheat would do better in interspecific competition. These results can possibly be explained by the idea of density-dependent growth meaning that as you increase population, resources such as light, soil, and water decrease and vice versa (Walsh and Walsh 2015). Also a possible explanation for our results is that the radish shoots were longer, taller, more in number versus the wheat shoots that were short, broad and few in number. The theory of allocating more roots if the there is less sun and bigger shots if there is less nutrient rich soil is shown in the experiment of intraspecific and interspecific competition of beans, in the end that beans that had more competition and the soil was poor had bigger leaves at the expense of its neighbors (Mania et al.

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