Bacteria Experiment

Researcher
Michael D Samuel, Statistician, National Biological Service, National Wildlife Health Center, Madison, WI
Description
An experiment performed at the National Wildlife Health Research Center under the supervision of Michael Samuel (Samuel, Goldberg, Thomas and Sharp 1995) examined the effect of a certain bacteria strain (mycoplasma) on the development of birds. Unfortunately, due to the danger of aerial infection, they had to isolate treatment groups in different rooms. A very conservative approach would take each chamber as an experimental unit, regardless of the number of birds per room. There were four treatments: cold, cold+myco, warm and warm+myco. In addition, the experiment was run in two runs since there were only 4 rooms.

Measurements were taken on almost 200 chicks in these rooms. It is possible to think of the experiment as having chicks (or eggs) randomly assigned to the rooms, and to consider the sample in each room as a random sample from a population of chicks exposed to that environment (combination of temperature and presence or absence of mycoplasma bacteria). This experiment on bird development was conducted in two runs separated by several weeks. Several things could have changed in that time, including the mycoplasma culture, seasonal changes of chick growth and food or water conditions. The scientist inoculated eggs in the first run, but decided to switch to inoculating young chicks in the later run. Earlier analysis in the text has assumed that inoculation could be just considered as another factor. Here it is viewed as a blocking factor with no replication. That is, strictly speaking it is not possible to assess the main effect of inoculation method since there is no replication of runs. However, it would be possible to assume that interactions with run were interactions with inoculation.

Reference
Samuel MD, Goldberg DR, Thomas CB and Sharp P (1995) ``Effects of Mycoplasma anatis and cold stress on hatching success and growth of mallard ducklings,'' J of Wildlife Diseases 31, 172-178.

Data & Setup

bactroom.dat
bact temp inoc bill leg code trt
bactroom.s
read data, anova, for one measurement per room
bacteria.dat
id bact temp inoc cage day bill leg
bacteria.s
read data, one-factor analysis of variance, some contrasts

SAS Data Analysis

bactroom.sas
room as experimental unit
bacteria.sas
chick as experimental unit

Book Figures

bactint.s
C: Bacteria Interaction Plots
bactlsd.s
C: Bacteria Two Factor Interaction Plots
bacthigh.s
C: Bacteria Three Factor Interaction Plots
bactnorm.s
C: Bacteria Half-Normal and Effect Plots by Room
bacteff.s
D:10.2 Bacteria Effect Plot by Bird
bactblk.s
H:22.2 Bacteria Interaction Plot Adjusted for Runs

Bookkeeping

makeroom.s
make bactroom.dat from bacteria.dat
bactall.dat.gz (gzip-ed)
id disease temp egg cage date day wt bill leg
bactall.sas
extact day 21 or 22 from bactall.dat to make bacteria.dat

Last modified: Tue Feb 10 08:55:54 1998 by Brian Yandell (yandell@stat.wisc.edu)