Chapter 4 Describing Your Data 181
f. Save your workbook and write a re-
port summarizing your investigation
and observations.
- Cuckoos are known to lay their eggs in
the nests of other host birds. The host
birds adopt and then later hatch the
eggs. The Eggs workbook contains data
on the lengths of cuckoo eggs found in
the nest of host birds. You’ve been asked
to compare the length of the cuckoo eggs
placed in the different nests.
a. Open the Eggs workbook from the
Chapter04 folder and save it as
Egg Statistics.
b. Create a boxplot of the egg lengths for
the different birds.
c. Calculate descriptive statistics of the
egg lengths.
d. One theory holds that cuckoos lay
their eggs in the nests of a particu-
lar host species and that they mate
within a defi ned territory. If true, this
would cause a geographic subspecies
of cuckoos to develop and natural
selection would ensure the survival
of cuckoos most fi tted to lay eggs that
would be adopted by a particular
host. If cuckoo eggs differed in length
between hosts, this would lend some
weight to that hypothesis. Do the
data indicate a possible difference in
cuckoo egg lengths between hosts?
Explain.
e. Save your changes to the workbook
and write a report summarizing your
observations.
