Data! Looking for trends

Post date: Jul 24, 2012 9:34:30 PM

Lately, everyone in Jon Payne's Paleobiology Group in Geocorner has been working with R Project, a program that works with code, to graph collected data. Everyone is preparing and working on their AGU posters to present in December. :)

In my previous blog, I posted a picture of me using a measuring caliper to measure gastropods! And now, here's a graph to visually show what that collected data looks like. Pretty cool, huh? It took me so long to figure out how to use R. It was extremely frustrating and my head was hurting from all the codes, but once the graph came out, I felt really accomplished. :) I have not input a legend because it gets in the way of the graph, so I'll explain here! The pink data points represent the Log Volume in log mm^3 of all the data collected for gastropods. I'm not the only one in the group who collects data for gastropods. Roberto and Shu work with gastropods also. The black line represents the mean log volume so that the graph is easier to look at since there are way too many pink data points to differentiate the changes over time. The blue line represents the percentage of atmospheric oxygen over time. For my AGU project, I want to focus on atmospheric oxygen as a potential factor that affects the changes in body size over time because I believe that oxygen is a very important resource and nutrient for survival. It seems right to me that an increase in oxygen should increase body size because there is a great uptake of nutrients. However, this graph shows that atmospheric oxygen barely has an effect on gastropod body size since the black line representing mean log volume is constant over time.

So Atmospheric Oxygen can be ruled out as potential factor affecting body size. Oh well. But there are tons of other factors that can affect body size, such as temperature or geographic location, and it'd be really cool to try and figure out exactly what affects the changes in body size.