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We hypothesized that the size of an organism has no effect on the size of that organism's cell. We saw no reason to conclude that large organisms would have large cells, and suspected that large organisms simply had more cells.

Below, we list the largest and smallest cells evident in each organism. Organisms are listed from smalled to largest.

1. Protista: cells were 30 to 40 microns wide, and about 100 microns long.

2. Buttercup root: 20 to 60 microns

3. Coleus: 7 to 15 microns

4. Pig: 3 to 6 microns

5. Pine stem: 10 to 30 microns

The general trend we discovered was that smaller organisms possessed larger cells. This is true in every case except the pig, which is also the only animal of our samples and so has different cell structure. It warrants more investigation to discover if this pattern holds true for larger samples of both plant and animal cells. We would guess that in general, smaller plants have larger cells and larger plants have smaller cells.

However, it is important to note that there is a great deal of variety in cell size within an organism. This could be seen in various samples, such as the coleus, which had very small cells around the edges and larger cells toward the center of the structure. A better question than if larger organisms have large cells would be whether the role of a cell in an organism affects the size of that cell.