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When we frist began our lab we thought that the relationship that existed between organisms and their cells was proportional. We figured that if an organism was larger, it meant that its cells were also large. We looked at several different slides and compared our knowledge of what organism these came from to determine whether our observations supported what we had thought to be true.

The first slide that we looked at was the buttercup slide. We looked at it throught he microscope at many different settings. We didn't take notes and instead moved on to other slides. We continued to look at all the slides thoroughly, and realized that we couldn't take any real measurements of anything because the sizes of cells changed and so did their shapes. It was more difficult to compare cells to their organisms and to each other than we had previously thought.

In the end we gave up on measuring everything in a specific way. We realized that size wasn't proportional, and decided that size didn't have to be measured exactly. Perhaps we used our tools in a different way than the rest of the class. While others tried to assign specific number measurements to their cells, we decided that

We did however realize that our idea that a cell was proportional to the organism it came from didn't actually work. For example, the cells in the buttercup were larger than those in the human uterus. That didn't support our hypothesis since we know that a human is on a different scale than a buttercup. We also noticed that the pine tree also had smaller cells which again didn't seem to fit what we had predicted would happen.

Another problem with how we set out to make our observations was that we didn't think of all the differences that would inevitable be present. We only took into account the size of the organisms and completely ignored the fact that these organisms are completely different which meant that their cells would follow the same pattern. We found different shapes which meant that we couldn't just measure everything in the same way. I guess the biggest problem was how we were going to measure everything. We had to make choices about how we thought things were meant to be measured, but sometimes these choices set the cells even further apart. At the beginning we had taken some measurements and they fit into some sort of range. For example the buttercup was from 30-45 microns and the pine stem was from 10-30 microns. Still, although these were informative, figuring out our ranges was sometimes too complicated. In some instances we had to completely change the range just for a couple of cells. 

I guess in the end we ended up not really quantifying the cells. We ended up basing everything on just observations and not on exact measurements. Still, we did realize that our first thoughts about how big cells and their organisms are were off.

Maria Fernanda Miranda

Karina Granadeno