Question

Using the two figures what can you conclude about the offspring and growth pattern in plants and animals? Thank you!

Relative width of annual rings (mm) OTTO 2 20 22 6 10 12 14 16 18 Mean number of cones per tree (x102) Absolute fecundity (Number of oocytes x 10 ) •:. S . 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 Specific growth rate (mm) 0.08 0.0

Answer 1

The first graph is correlating the relative width of annual rings to a number of cones per tree. The relative width of annual rings is a measure of the age of the plants, while the cone count is a measure of the offsprings. As can be seen, there seems to be a significant negative correlation between the growth and the offsprings. However, most of the plants have a very high growth rate as can be seen by a large bunch of data points localized to a specific section.

In the case of animals too the growth appears to be negatively correlated with the offspring count. However, the correlation is extremely weak with a huge variability at each data point. Additionally, there is variability in the growth.