Elephant Ears Essay

Testing the Growth Rate of Elephant Ears (Colocasia esculenta) and Irises (Iris versicolor)

INTRODUCTION

Global change is taking place every day; therefore, it is important to understand how human activities and behavior alters the biodiversity and functions of ecosystems. Alien species is a stimulator of major changes in ecosystems (Vila et al. 2011). An invasive species, is a non-native plant, animal, or fungus that moves to a new ecosystem in a foreign environment. Invasive ecology explores how the invasive species affect the economic, environmental, and human health on the new environment. For example, invasive ecology studies how an invasive species tends to crowd out and sometimes replace a native species (Richardson and Pysek 2008).

Since elephant ears are extremely invasive in freshwater wetlands including in Louisiana, the overall question of our experiment is to see how we can manage elephant ear and what native species can resist them. The answer our class specially is looking for is if irises resist elephant ears. Overall, we hope to gain knowledge on how to control elephant ears. The experiment was set up to address the purpose by pairing up the species in 3 different combinations, EE EI and II, in three replicates to see their interactions with each other. Each group has a single barrier type, which would be one of the following: no barrier, root separate barrier or foliage separate barrier. The purpose of the barriers is an experimental control to observe if it makes a difference on the growth of the plants and the purpose of the root weights and stem weights are for finding the growth rate of each plant. The alternative hypothesis is that elephant ears will have an effect on the growth rate of the Iris and the null hypothesis is elephant ears will not have an effect on the growth rate of the iris. Through all the information taught this semester, the EI treatment, Iris grown with the elephant ears, will have a smaller growth rate than II treatment, the iris that are growing