Last week of the experiment...

These two past weeks concluded our field experiment: we did the last silk application last week and took the last measurements on kale this week.  

We let all our spiders free

 ...and harvested the kale.

The last measurements done on kale include:
-Height
-Chlorophyll content
-Above ground biomass
       -fresh weight
       -dry weight
-Average leaf damage

With those measurements, we aim to evaluate if there is a difference regarding plant productivity between kale plants treated with spider silk and the control plants.

It was a good time to finish the experiment because the kale leaves grew much bigger and thicker which made it harder to apply silk on the plants without damaging them.  Doing damage on the plants is counter-productive because we aim to evaluate the level of damage as an indicator of plant productivity.

Next steps:

-use statistics methods to evaluate if there is a difference in the different productivity measurements among our two samples

-graph our results

-evaluate the changes made to our initial experimental design

-consider a possible 'lab component of the experiment' with more controlled variables

-discuss possible improvements and provide advice for further investigation in the same topic