A few years ago, Free-State high school found an exciting project. Teachers came together to use an old football field to conduct fun experiments! First, they divided it into 18 plots, each containing plants to make a prairie. But they didn't stop there. They sectioned each plot into a category: Exclusively tall grasses; mix between grasses and forbs; and lastly, double forbs with the same amount of grass. (All of which include different species.) Our question was about the height of the forbs. Specifically, the cup plant which is a type of flower that has a square stem with leaves that pair up in twos, and can grow to 7 feet tall! We chose this question because we wanted to understand if different surrounding plants had any major effect on the height of the plants. 

In our research, we found no real factor for why the heights vary like they do. There are different types of birds that are limiting the reproduction of these cup plants by eating their seeds as part of the birds diet, or wasps laying eggs inside of the stems forcing the larvae to eat through the stems to escape.  Some abiotic factors may be playing into the population of these plants. Such as overcrowding due to a high biomass level (total amount of organisms in a given volume).