NAME: Griffin Woodlief

CLASS: 1 Science
DATE: 4/6/14

PLANARIA LAB REPORT

PROBLEM: If trisected, which piece of a planarian will regenerate first?

HYPOTHESIS: If trisected, then the anterior will regenerate first.

THEORY:

Planarians are invertebrate flatworms that can reproduce both asexually and
sexually. Planarians are hermaphrodites, which means that they have both male and
female gonads. This means that any two planarians can sexually reproduce together.
This means that unlike most animals, they can have offspring in more than one
different way. One way that planarian can reproduce is sexually, which means that
there are two parents who both. They release eggs, which hatch in two to three
weeks. Sexual reproduction is often times better than asexual reproduction because
the offspring are more genetically diverse.

Asexual reproduction is the second main way that planarian reproduce and
have offspring. Although planarian usually reproduce sexually, they can also
reproduce asexually. Reproducing asexually is different than reproducing sexually
in many ways, but the most important one is that to reproduce asexually, there only
needs to be one planarian. Tail dropping and fragmentation are two different
methods of asexual reproduction that planarian use. Tail dropping is when a
planarian drops its tail so the tail will grow back into another planarian. The
offspring are clones of the parent and are not at all genetically diverse.

Neoblasts are undifferentiated stem cells that allow planarian to regenerate.
Regeneration means that if a planarian is cut into multiple small pieces, then all of
the pieces will grow back to an almost full sized planarian. Neoblasts work by
swarming to the area where the planarian has been cut. There is then a blastema, or
a cluster or cells, at the wound. The reason that I thought the anterior would
regenerate the fastest is because I thought the anterior (or head) would be the piece
that the other pieces would be the hardest to grow back.

DATA:


CONCLUSION:

In this lab we trisected a planarian to see which one would regenerate the
fastest. I hypothesized that the anterior piece would regenerate first. When I first
looked at the planarian pieces, the pigmentation on the mid section was the darkest
of the three. My data shows by day 9, the mid section had small signs of a tail and
had also grown a head. The anterior piece had not yet grown a tail, and the posterior
piece didnt quite have a full head.

ANALYSIS:


Although planarian are invertebrate, they, like humans, have stem cells.
Although they both have stem cells, there are similarities and differences between
them. The biggest and most important similarity between planarian and human
stem cells is that both of them are undifferentiated. This means that they have the
potential to become any cell in the body. In planarian, the stem cells are neoblasts,
and their purpose is to help heal the planarian when it is hurt or reproducing
asexually.




8
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38
37
49
14
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100
Anterior Mid Section Posterior
%

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2014 Regeneration Data
1st Period
7th Grade