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Un Buro™ Muy Terco

Howdy-Ho Floggerinos!

Today I was challenged to count seeds from a few different species of plants. The intention behind this assignment I believe was to teach me how to utilize the Lab’s SeedBuro™ 801 Count-A-Pak® using a variety of seed types. However, the seed-counter had other plans, absolutely refusing to count in spite of our sweet pleads and gentle coaxing. Without the mechanized aid of the SeedBuro™ I was forced to improvise. First, in classic American fashion, I tried brute force, emptying each pack into a Pyrex dish and counting every seed by hand.  This worked well for the first few packs of 50-60 seeds but I soon found myself overwhelmed as the seeds began to number into the hundreds. For the large seed packets, I decided to deduce a count by dividing the total mass by that of a single seed mass (SSM). I found the SSM by taking 5 random samples of 10 seeds from the packet in question, weighing them, and averaging those masses. I then divided that average by ten which gave me my SSM. Finally, I took the total seed mass and divided it by the SSM which gave me a seed count. This procedure allowed to me to count a 2,390 Carex seed sample in just a few minutes.

Seeds from two different plant families (Poaeceae on the left and Cyperaceae on the right) to be counted
The seed counter adamant that there are no seeds in the tray

After an afternoon of seed counting I returned to work weighing biomass and finally completed weighing the contents of the second Day 4 cardboard box. I have now collected the biomass data from over 420 plants. I am very excited to begin learning how best to process and analyze all this data!

The clear tub is filled with all the newly weighed samples from the box on the right.
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