Evolution 4133 Blog

  In todays lecture we learned about sperm competition and combat in male to male competition.  A real life example of sperm to sperm competition would be some species of flies. They compete with other males by increasing their sperm load and reproduce if their sperm is fast enough. It is a constant competition, inside and outside of the body.  A real life example of combat competition would be moose fighting for a female. With their large antlers, they are used as weapons to fight with another male. These males combat with their antlers to prove strength to the other male. They rarely die from these fights, but the article I read said that their antlers will get stuck with each other and the moose die from starvation. It made me so sad to read that.  These two competitions are similar in the fact that their overall goal is to reproduce and nothing will get in their way internally or externally. They all have the same mindset with different tactics of doing so...

 One thing I found confusing was the stronger the sexual selection, the stronger the sexual dimorphism. How is this possible? They also mention how in species where both parents care for child, there is less dimorphism? How are these species able to select a partner if they aren't showing these extravagant physical genes?  What happens if the coupled species, loses a partner.. Does this put them at a disadvantage?  Something I learned was that fighting is not only considered physical touch! They mentioned how fighting can also mean "competing", an example would be birds building nest or signing beautiful songs. 

I love speciation, I have always enjoyed learning more about it in high school and ecology last year. Speciation can be pretty confusing, my three questions are the following: 1. For genealogical species, how does that animal know that this stranger shares their genes with them, do they not confuse some  other species who may look alike? 2. Will post-zygotic isolation grow to be more fitting and advantageous? 3. It almost seems impossible to determine every species of animals in the world because there are so many, how did they keep track of species already identified especially without the technology we have today?

 I am blessed to have this woman as my mother, the best role model!!! people will literally stop us at grocery stores to tell us how much we look alike, there is no denying her!!!

 

*Figure Explanation - there is an even allele frequency, a random predator selects at random, new fitness is relatively brown.    1. The strength of selection influences allelic frequency over generations.        a. Under what circumstances do we expect to see an increase in allelic frequency? An increase in allelic frequency more than likely means that there is an increase in the relative fitness of the species. In simpler words, the better genes they have to survive the more babies they will create with these same good genes!          b. What influences how quickly allelic frequency changes?  The relative fitness can determine how quickly allelic frequency changes, A mutation in the relative fitness of the species can quickly change the allele frequencies from now on. 2. Population size influences the change in allelic frequency over generations. In some of the simulations the red lines went to z...