Essay On Limiting Factors

LIMITING FACTORS THAT AFFECT GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT IN SAMPLED ORGANISM
Carmen Sophia T. Rubia
INTRODUCTION
Living organisms need to maintain food, water, shelter and a space in order to survive. So long as these necessities are available, their population will continue to grow. However, it is not always that they can maintain their population to grow. There are forms of environmental resistance that will stop the population’s growth and these resistance are called limiting factors. Limiting factors include abiotic factors such as temperature, pH and salinity. These factors limit the survival and distribution of organisms in different parts of the world. However, limiting factors don’t always limit the growth of the population but it can also increase the population. They either prevent or help organisms to flourish in

2 Percentage of corn seeds that completed germination in a seven-day period

Figure 2 shows that the corn seeds treated with pH 5.0 or 4.0 simulated acid rain had the lowest percentage of total corn seeds germinated within the seven-day period. Those with lower pH levels may possibly slow the metabolism of the corn seeds and also explains the shorter roots in the corn seeds especially those treated with pH 3.0 simulated acid rain. Corn seeds’ potential adaptability being more able to germinate in pH levels that are within the standard or the national average with pH 6.0 simulated rain.
Salinity
This result is also based from a different experiment conducted in Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Quezon City, Philippines entitled: Temperature, pH, and Salinity as Limiting Factors Affecting Growth, Development, and Survival of different organisms. For the entire germinated seedling in each set-up, root length (R) and shoot length (S) were also measured (Table 3). The root to shoot ratio (R/S) from the previous data was derived and the results was compared (Figure 3).
Table 3. The average root and shoot length of the corn