Refer to the Table

Essay

Refer to the table. In 1879, W.J.Beal began an experiment that he could not hope to finish in his lifetime.He prepared 20 lots of seeds for long-term storage.Each lot consisted of 50 seeds from each of 23 species.He mixed each lot of seeds with sand and placed the mixture in an uncapped bottle, then buried all the bottles in a sandy knoll.At 5- or 10-year intervals over the next century, biologists excavated a bottle and checked the viability of its contents.The table shows the number of germinating seeds (of the original 50) from three of the species in years 50-100 of this ongoing experiment.What factors do you think might influence the differences among the species in long-term seed viability?