The Phoenix Growth Curve

The scientist in me likes to take data and analyze it. Earlier this week in lab, I was conducting a very standard microbiological test called a "growth curve" to characterize a new bacterium we have. It involves starting a culture at a low concentration of bacteria, letting the bacteria grow and measuring the concentration of the bacteria at various timepoints during the day. Bacteria have a very well defined time course with multiple phases of growth (lag, exponential, stationary). For more information you can look at the wikipedia entry on bacterial growth. I became interested to see if Phoenix was in exponential growth. So, I plotted his weight measurements over the past few vet visits and fit the data with a linear and an exponential curve. As it turns out, it appears he is in exponential growth (look at the R^2 values-- closer to 1 means a better fit!). I'll have to take more datapoints to confirm that though. It looks like he'll reach full size between 4 and 6 months. Perhaps the linear model is more correct since vizsla pups don't usually reach full size until closer to 6 months.

Yes, I am a scientist...