Practise choosing and carrying out quadrats, transects and mark-release-recapture. Questions test random placement, repeated abundance measures, capture and harmless marking,…
The Venus fly trap, Dionaea muscipula, is a carnivorous plant. It has traps which catch insects.
Each trap consists of a pair of modified leaves joined by a midrib of hinge cells. The modified leaves have touch-sensitive hairs. If two hairs are touched within 20 seconds, or the same hair is touched twice in rapid succession, the trap closes.
D. muscipula grows naturally in a small region in eastern USA. Fires that destroy much of the vegetation occur in this region. Three sites in this region where there had been fires were identified and investigated.
- Site 1 had experienced a fire 2 years before.
- Site 2 had experienced a fire 10 years before.
- Site 3 had experienced a fire 30 years before.
Preliminary observations suggested that over the course of time following a fire, the biodiversity of plants had increased. However, the abundance of Venus fly trap plants had decreased and so had the light intensity available to them. There was also a decrease in the nitrogen that the plants absorbed from insects as a proportion of all the nitrogen they obtained from their environment.
Name an ecological or statistical method to measure:
the abundance of D. muscipula at each site
random sampling using frame quadrats ;