Pinguicula is a genus of carnivorous plants called butterworts. For the species found in the southeastern United States, they make little star shaped plants that are sticky. If a small fly touches the plant, it gets stuck, then the plant dissolves it for nutrients. Pinguicula pumila is the smallest of the species. From my observations, they grow in disturbed areas much like, and often found with, some of the small Drosera species, D. brevifolia and D. capillaris. Maybe fire would burn some places down to the ground, scaring the landscape. Then these little plants take over. Similar to ground scaring are the use of machinery to make ditches. Ditches not only scar the ground, but often are kept clear of vegetation, and hold water. Carnivorous plants seems to like it moist. The plants here are found in pine flatwoods or savannas. The pine needles fall and they decompose. It this sandy area this needle decomposition makes the ground "acidic." Acidic soils I believe dissolve nutrients. Without nutrients a lot of plants don't like to grow in acidic soils. To combat the lack of nutrients in the soil, plants turned to dissolving insect through carnivorous plant behaviors. With introductions out of the way, I will go into the topic of Pingucila pumila at 4 Creeks.
4 Creeks WMA I was told was purchased 15 years ago? I will have to research that later. I haven't found too many articles on plants for the area. It is also very wild. So there are plants to discover!
I wanted to apply and show my recent post on data sampling. My mind was still thinking about the topic and an idea came into my head. I am going to put my post discussion to action. Looking at Pinguicula pumila in the woods, I noticed it had white and purple flowers. I ask the question: how many purple and how many white flowered plants are there? Is there an in between? Are they different or do they change colors over time? Lets take a look at what I am talking about.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. Note the purple and yellow centers of the flowers indicating different plants.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. Although the younger flower is white and not purple, the center maintains the dark purple like the taller flowers from this plant.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. More yellow centered and purple centered white flowers.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. Purple centered flowers. On the lower you can see the back of the flower is burgundy, but this is all part of the purple-ing process.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. More purple centers on white flowers.
On the same plant I noticed white flowers and lavender flowers. Well maybe the flowers change color with age? If this is the case then there is nothing else to say about the flowers. Even on plants that I would say were of the purple variety, some had white flowers. I examined many more flowers and looked at the back of the flowers.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. The back of the flowers can reveal if they are "purple" or "yellow" color varieties. Here are mostly purple flowers, but one is yellow backed. The color differences are from different plants.
Mostly yellow backed Pinguicula pumila flowers.
More yellow backed Pinguicula pumila flowers. Note some are white petaled, some are lavender. This could happen on the same plant.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. A better look at the petals and the yellow flower backs.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. Purple and yellow backed. From different plants.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. I point out a yellow back. Looking at other flowers, some have yellow eyes, the middles are yellow. The purple variety seems to have purple eyes, the middles are purple.
Here is a Pinguicula pumila plant with multiple flowers. Some are more purple than others, but they all have a purple eyed center.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. Now looking at the back of the flowers, they all have a purple back, an indication of the purple flower variety.
Here is a Pinguicula pumila plant with multiple flowers. Some are more purple than others, but they all have a yellow eyed center.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. Now looking at the back of the flowers, they all have a yellow back, an indication of the yellow flower variety.
Yellow variety of Pinguicula pumila flowers.
Pinguicula pumila flowers. Note the center and the backs of the flowers. That is how I can distinguish between the purple and yellow varieties.
I now make the claim there are two varieties. The purple and the yellowed backed flowers for Pinguicula pumila. The amount of purple or white of a flower seems to vary and can appear different on flowers from the same plant. But the yellow and the purple center and backs stay true. This is what I used to distinguish the two. The date of all this, March 11, 2018. I was out there from 3:10PM to 5:30PM.
Next I located clumps of the plants. For my purpose, I call each of these clumps a different site or population (population is relative, all these sites are of the 4 Creeks population). At each site of a population or clummp of Pinguicula pumila plants, I made a quick count of the number of purple and yellow variety plants. I wrote the numbers down on a notepad. I could quickly tell by counting there were more yellow than purple flowered plants. I completed counts for 9 different sites. I then went home and put the data into Excel. Using the methods I described in my Data First Analysis post, I put talk to action. I entered the counts into a table.
To read the table, I have Purple and Yellow plants listed. Then the site which combines both colors to give me the total number of plants. Then I have the site name. Site names are based on locations, next to a fence, the parking lot, or the road. I have 9 sites total. Below this information, I have the statistics. The count just lists how many sites I sampled. The sum is the total number added together for each of the Purple, Yellow, Site Total columns. The average is the average for each column. The StdEv is the Standard Deviation for each column. The StdError is the Standard Error for each column.
The table tells us from 9 sites, I counted 1662 total plants. That is a lot. Some sites had hundreds of plants. One site had just 82 plants. The largest number of plants site had 450. On average 184 plants were at each site. There were more yellow than purple plants.
I then made a graph.
I don't need to run a statistical test to show there is a different between the number of purple and yellow colored flowers. I probably will later, but the answer is clear. I found more yellow than purple flower colored plants.
This data is tricky because the number of plants between each site varies. Looking at data like this could be affected by such differences in the number of plants. I will then look at this data through percentages. The percentages will no longer account for the number of plants, rather will look at the number of sites. I have 9 sites, the rule of 8 says we need 8.
In this table I converted the number of the previous table into percentages of flower colors at each of the sites. When the percent of each color is added together for a single site, they add up to 100%. Note how the Purple variety ranged from 8 to 25 percent. In direct comparison, the Yellow variety ranged from 75 to 92 percent. Looking at the statistics, the averages of 17% purple to 83% yellow varieties can explain the ratio of colors among Pinguicula pumila flowers. This is a 1 to 4 ratio. For every 1 purple flower, you will get 4 yellow flowers. There are 4 times as many yellow flowers as there are purple flowers. Purple flowers are uncommon compared to the more common yellow flowers. There are not equal numbers of purple and yellow flowers.
Thinking about the punnet square and genetics, seems we would see a 25% to 75% if purple and yellow have dominant recessive characteristics. If you had two genetically hybrid individuals, holding both sets of genes, the punnet square theory would give 75% yellow and 25% purple flowers.
My 17% to 83% isn't that far off from the 25% to 75% theory. Flower color may be a genetic trait. To test this, crosses would have to be made of purple and yellow flowered plants sort of like Gregor Mendel did with his famous pea plants experiments. Why did I not get exactly 25% and 75%, well that might just be because of drift or any number of reasons.
Besides populations at 4 Creeks, I need to investigate populations in other locations to determine if I am getting similar ratios of purple to yellow plants.
I also think I need to explain why I used the average of 17.14239% rather than the 297/1662 = 17.87% for purple flowers and similarly for yellow flowers for people that might ask such a question. I have taken the average of the averages for each site, not the single over all average. I'd hate to say that is just how statistics works.
I typed this up fast and late just to get the idea out there so I could get some feedback and tell my tale to others. I may work on improving this post later.
Thank you for reading! Comment if you would like! Have a nice day!
I do want to thank a reviewer for pointing out a type of the graph that did affect one of the graphs by 2%. That is what is good about using more samples/sites. Mistakes won't have that much of affect on the overall result... you hope. In this case it was alright, but I did fix it. Thank you!
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