Aubree's Evolution Blog

 Male-Male Competition is when two males will fight one another for access to a female. There are 4 types of male-male competition that were discussed in the lectures.  Combat i s one type of male-male competition. This is when males will display aggression towards another male. The two males will fight for access to a female in order to mate with her. An example of this behavior is moose using their antlers to fight one another.  Another type of male-male competition is alternative mating strategies . Males can show different behaviors in order to gain access to females. An example of this can be seen in coho salmon. Some of these male are large and have aggressive fighting behavior. Other males are much smaller and mimic the females. Both of these behaviors are to help them gain mating access to females.  These strategies are similar because in both instances males use aggression against another male to gain mating access. They are different because the alternativ...

 One thing that I did not understand completely from the podcast was the difference between the types of  condition dependent indicator and the condition independent indicator .  It was said that the condition dependent indicator is when a female chooses a male that has survived to reproductive age so the male will pass those those traits that made him survive to the females young so her young will then be able to survive.  The condition independent indicator was said to be traits directly linked to a genetic benefit.  I am needing more information on the condition independent indicator because I am not sure how the female is able to pick out those traits.  One thing that I found to be new information to me and to also be interesting was "Sexy Sun Model" . This model states that there is no benefits to the traits that the females like, the females just like these traits for random reasons and this causes a feedback loop where more of the traits are in t...

  Three questions that I have about speciation are: 1. How long does it take for speciation to occur? Has there even been speciation that has been relatively fast? 2. Why are there so many concepts for what a species is? 3. Does everything have to fit into a species? This question is from the lecture video but I am curious about this question. 

  Something that makes me feel good is my families pup Maverick! 

  What genetic drift IS: Genetic Drift is RANDOM. In the case shown above there is a population of pink, blue, and purple bugs. A portion of that population got squashed by a shoe. That portion happened to be 2 purple bugs and a blue bug. There was only 2 purple bugs in the population to begin with so now there is not any more purple bugs in the population at all because these bugs randomly died.   What Genetic Drift is NOT:  Genetic Drift is not when a species has a phenotype that will allow them to better survive their environment. The green bugs above all get eaten by the lizard because their color stands out to the lizard against the dark bark of the tree. The brown bugs are not seen by the lizard so they are not eaten. This is not Genetic Drift, this is Natural Selection.

 Phenotypic Plasticity is the ability of an organism to change their phenotype in relation to the environment that they are in.  In the paper " The Genetic Basis of Adaptation following Plastic Changes in Coloration in a Novel Environment"  a study was done on lizards that live on these lava rocks. The lizards living on the dark lava rocks have a dark phenotype that enables them to blend into the rocks. These researches found that when you remove these lizards from the dark rocks and place them on a much lighter substrate, then these lizards become much lighter in color in order to blend in with the substrate. They also compared the lizards already living on the lava rocks to lizards nearby who were living off of the lava rocks. They found that when exposed to the dark colored substrate that both groups of lizards had a much darker phenotype, however, the researchers observed that the lizards already living on the lava rocks had darker phenot...