Vocabulary
What do you call a related organism from a previous generation?
Ancestor
Name one trait that you possess.
Ex. brown eyes, curly hair, big feet.
True or False: animals can inherit broken bones and scars.
False
In the newts, after snakes were introduced to the environment, what sort of trait was the high poison level?
Adaptive
Name one animal from the Mutation reading.
What do you call the changes that happen when genes are imperfectly copied and passed down to offspring during reproduction?
Mutations
Adaptive traits are important for individuals, as they allow individuals to…
…live longer and (therefore) have more offspring.
Individuals inherit their _______, and therefore their traits, from their parents.
Genes
In the newts, after snakes were introduced into the environment, what sort of trait was a low-poison level?
Non-adaptive
What is the name of the graph that we have been using in this unit?
Histogram
What do you call the process by which the distribution of traits in a population changes over many generations?
Natural selection
Over many generations, individuals with adaptive traits become _________ in a population.
More common
Genes provide the instructions for making a particular _________.
Protein molecule
In the population of rough-skinned newts, how did we learn that poisonousness was an adaptive trait?
We saw that, after the snakes were introduced, high poison levels became more common.
True or False: mutations always result in an adaptive trait.
False
What do you call a scientist that studies how the environment affects populations of organisms?
Biologist
In this unit, we talked about a population of rough-skinned newts that became poisonous after snakes entered the environment. If the snakes were to disappear, what would you now consider the poison trait to be?
The poison trait would be neither adaptive or non-adaptive, because it has no impact on the newts’ survival other than protecting them from snakes.
There is a population of rabbits that only includes individuals with short hair. They live close to the equator. If snow suddenly falls, covering the rabbits’ entire environment, what will happen to the population?
The rabbits will die, since none of the individuals have the long-hair trait that could be passed down and would allow any of them to survive.
Which animal is known to taste the rough-skinned newts to tell if they are poisonous before eating them?
Garter snake
Who was Alfred Wallace?
A scientist who came up with the idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin.
What do you call something in the environment that affects an individual’s chances of surviving?
A selection pressure
Which advantage were stickleback fish granted by having less armor?
Increased speed and ability to escape predators.
How does the ability to mutate help populations survive?
Mutations may insert new traits into a population, creating greater genetic diversity and allowing a population to adapt to a changed environment.
Name one state that rough-skinned newts live in.
Oregon
A “bottleneck effect” occurs when a population shrinks suddenly, usually due to an outside cause like a natural disaster. What happens to a population that suffers a “bottleneck effect”?
The population’s genetic diversity is reduced, because only the genes of the survivors are passed on.