Comparing tropical flowers. Example 25.1 (text page 623) describes a study of the lengths of three varieties of the tropical flower Heliconia. Table 25.1 gives the data. One-way ANOVA gives strong evidence (F =259.12, P
(a) How confident are you that all three of these intervals capture the true differences between pairs of population means?
(b) Write a short summary of the results of the ANOVA, including the multiple comparisons.
Example 25.1:
STATE: Ethan Temeles and W. John Kress of Amherst College studied the relationship between varieties of the tropical flowerHeliconia on the island of Dominica and the different species of hummingbirds that fertilize the flowers.1 Over time, the researchers believe, the lengths of the flowers and the forms of the hummingbirds' beaks have evolved to match each other. If that is true, flower varieties fertilized by different hummingbird species should have distinct distributions of length. Table 25.1 gives length measurements (in millimeters) for samples of three varieties of Heliconia, each fertilized by a different species of hummingbird. Do the three varieties display distinct distributions of length? In particular, are the mean lengths of their flowers different?
