Post #3 Ongoing Field Observations

I have continued to do field observations in my area of study. One my last visit, I identified two very interesting phenomena that did not catch my attention the last few times I have been there. I am not quite sure which experiment I am going to choose, so I am going to write this post inclusive of both of them and perhaps with some feedback and further consideration I will come to a final decision.

Option One:

I may choose to study the cottontails that surround the pond. There is a large amount of them in varying abundance in different groups around the pond. During my last visit, I noticed that some of the cottontail heads are beginning to fall apart, which I assume is for reproduction similar to how dandelions reproduce because they seem to fall apart into white fluff that seem like seedlings. However, some groups have many cottontails that have fallen apart or began to fall apart easily upon some light shaking and tapping with a stick. Other groups in the pond had cottontail heads that were still very firm and remained that way with similar shaking or tapping. After considering variables such as cottontail height, sunlight, cottontail abundance, and moisture, there did not seem to be any patterns. I later realized that I was not taking into account the pine trees as part of the abundance, and noticed that it seemed that the more crowded an area was, the less likely it was to have cottontails that were falling apart. I hypothesize that the cottontails that have less vegetation nearby and therefore less competition fall apart and reproduce faster, ensuring them better success and fitness, because they have better access to the available nutrients in the ecosystem. My prediction is that cottontails in less crowded areas would fall apart earlier and cottontails in more crowded areas would fall apart later in the season. Possible response variables could be the degree to which the cottontails have fallen apart (continuous) or the ratio of cottontails that have fallen apart versus stayed intact (continuous) and the possible explanatory variable could be number of cottontail heads in a given study area (continuous), number of trees and distance from the identified group of cottontails (continuous).

Option Two:

As I noticed the role of the pine trees in this pattern with the cottontails, I saw that they were in the process of making and dropping pine cones. Some trees had many early pinecones and some trees had many late stage pinecones in a way that varied greatly from tree to tree. I thought perhaps that they followed a similar pattern as the cottontails in terms of crowding and competition, but this did not seem to have any recognizable pattern. However, because this visit was done during clear skies, I was able to see how the sunlight hit the trees for most of the day and the path it would take across the sky over the daylight hours. That is how I noticed that the trees that got more sunlight seemed to have more early stage pinecones and the trees blocked by the shade of other trees as well as the branches that got less direct sunlight had more of the late stage pinecones. I hypothesize that decreasing sunlight is a trigger that signals to the plant that it is winter and time to shed the non-useful parts of the tree, triggering the shift from early to late stage pinecones. I predict that the trees that receive the most direct sunlight will shift into late stage pinecones later in the season that those that do not receive as much direct sunlight. The response variable would be the ratio of early to late stage pinecones (continuous) and the explanatory variable would be sunlight amount (low light versus high light) (categorical).