Three varieties of flowers. The study of tropical flowers and their hummingbird pollinators (Exercise 3.74, page 125) measured the lengths of three varieties of Heliconia flowers. We expect that such biological measurements will have roughly Normal distributions.
(a) Make Normal quantile plots for each of the three flower varieties. Which distribution is closest to Normal?
(b) The other two distributions show the same kind of mild deviation from Normality. In what way are these distributions non-Normal?
Exercise 3.74
Hummingbirds and flowers. Different varieties of the tropical flower Heliconia are fertilized by different species of hummingbirds. Over time, the lengths of the flowers and the form of the hummingbirds' beaks have evolved to match each other. Here are data on the lengths in millimeters of three varieties of these flowers on the island of Dominica:
Make boxplots to compare the three distributions. Report the five-number summaries along with your graph. What are the most important differences among the three varieties of flower?