Tomatosphere 2019

Tomatoshere Experiment at Frederick Banting Alternate 2019

What is the Tomatosphere?:

The tomatosphere is an experiment run by the University of Guelph and the Canadian International Space Agency where they allow for classrooms that apply to be able to grow two groups of tomatoes. The groups are labelled by letters, and the participants are not told which group has been subjected to special conditions. Sometimes the tomato seeds have been subject to being in zero gravity conditions, or even different levels atmosphere components, etc. This year the tomato seeds were exposed to zero gravity conditions by being on the International Space Station. However, out of the two groups (L and M) that were given out to the participants, only one group had been exposed to the zero gravity conditions, while the other was simply exposed to regular earth conditions.

Observations:

Group L seemed to flourish more. The seeds germinated faster than group M, and group L grew significantly faster and with more green coloured stems and leaves than group M. Group M on the other hand had a smaller percentage of germination in addition to the germination taking longer. When the plants grew, group M had a stem that was remarkably more pink in colour than group L, in addition to the stem length being smaller and the leaves being less in quantity and smaller in size.

Conclusions:

May 6, 2019

While conducting the tomatosphere experiment, we noticed that group L grew significantly faster, taller, and more green than group M. There was a potential source of error however, where group M seemed to have acquired a layer of mold for a period of time. For some of the tomatoes it seemed to cap on the top of the dirt pod, which may have made it hard for some of the non-germinated seeds to sprout, and as for the seeds that had already germinated, it may have made it more difficult for them to flourish. In group M, out of thirty planted tomatoes, seven did not germinate. And in group L, again with thirty seeds, two germinated very late and only one did not germinate at all. With May 06, 2019, being the end of the experiment, it appears that the final resulting measures show that group L have more leaves than group M, which would present the theory that group L had an easier time growing and ergo grew faster than group M. In addition to this, and as well as intriguing, group L has been leaning considerably further towards the natural light source than group M; this goes to say that the angle of which group L was leaning towards the sun was much smaller than the angle that group M was leaning towards that same source. An hypothesis that our class has for this would be that perhaps if the roots of group L are shorter, they may be focusing more on phototropism than geotropism - which would suggest that group L had been in zero-gravity conditions. Contrairly, this would suggest that group M has longer roots and therefore has more of a balance between geotropism and phototropism than group L. Regardless and in conclusion, group L grew notably better than group M.

Edit:

June 4 2019

It ends up that group M was the group that was in the international space station. Group M was shorter and more pink in colour than group L, which could potentially be due to the vastly different conditions they were in (such as the significantly smaller amount of gravity)