11/18 Evidence for Evolution Binder Check

  • Bellwork

11.  Week of 11/13 (monkey)……………………………………………………..____/3

10.  Week of 11/4 (ants) …………………………………………….____/5

9.    Week of 10/28 (butterfly)…………………………….………….……____/5  

8.    Week of 10/21 (mushroom)…………………………………….…….____/5  

              ______/18
Notes

18.  Speciation Notes…………………………………….……….………____/5

17.  Video Guide Bozeman Biology–Cladograms……………………._____/5

16.  Evidence of Evolution Flipbook………………………………..……____/5

15.  Evidence for Evolution Notes………………………………….……____/5

14.  Stated Clearly Evidence for Evolution……………………………..____/5

13.  Whales in Transition…………………………………………………____/5

    ______/25

Assignments

17.  Speciation Webquest…………………………………………….____/5

16.  Cladogram 2 Practice…………………………………………….____/5

15.  Intro Day 1 Cladograms……………………………..………….____/5

14.  Evidence of Evolution Review Sheet………………………….____/5

______/20
Labs

5.  Evidence of Evolution Stations ANSWER SHEET………….____/10

TOTAL: ________/73

Binder Check 10/23

Binder checks will be on Wednesday (which is Evolution Test 1 day). These assignments need to be in the binder in tabs in this correct order to be graded.

Bellwork

  1. 10/14 (crab)
  2. 10/7  (cherry)

Notes

  1. Hand–Mechanisms for evolution
  2. 5 mechanisms for evolution
  3. Types of NS Notes
  4. Stabilizing selection (readings)
  5. Stated Clearly
  6. Evolution, Darwin and NS Guided notes

Assignments

  1. 5 mechanisms of evolution review
  2. Patterns of NS WS
  3. 4 parts NS Stations
  4. 4 parts NS CFA Quiz Corrections (or persistent pests)
  5. 4 points of Darwins NS Case studies
  6. Color Variation over time in pocket mice (or GD/NS review)

Labs (none)

Pocket Mice

Color variation over time in rock pocket mouse populations.

Introduction:

A typical rock pocket mouse is about 170 millimeters long from nose to rump, shorter than an average pencil. And at just 15 grams, this tiny mouse weighs about as much as a handful of paper clips. Rock pocket mice, however, have had an enormous impact on science. What’s so special about them? 

You can find populations of rock pocket mice all over the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States. There are two common varieties—a light-colored variety and a dark-colored variety. There are also two major colors of substrate, or surface materials, that make up the desert floor. Most of the landscape consists of light-colored sand and rock, but patches of dark volcanic rocks that formed from cooling lava flows are found, separated by several kilometers of light-colored substrate.

Procedure:

The illustrations on the back represent snapshots of rock pocket mouse populations. Each quadrant illustration shows the color variation at two different locations, A and B, at a particular moment in time. (Note: The images are out of order.) 

1. Count the number of light-colored and dark-colored mice present at each location at each moment in time. Record your counts in a chart that resembles the one to the right.

Time 1:

Time 2:


Time 3:

Time 4:

2. Rank the illustrations what you think is the correct order from oldest to most recent. 

3. Explain how you decided which illustration represents the most recent rock pocket mouse population and why you positioned the others in the sequence as you did.

TimeLocation A  LightLocation A  DarkLocation B  LightLocation B Dark
1



2



3



4



Oldest ______ ________ _________ _______  Most Recent

4. Watch the video: Think about the following as you watch the film: 

• Why are some mice light colored and some mice dark colored? 

• Does fur color provide any selective advantage or disadvantage? 

• What role does the rock pocket mouse play in the desert food web? 

• What can explain the differences among the illustrations? 

5. Using what you learned by watching the film, check the order in which you arranged the illustrations. Change the order as necessary. Once you are satisfied that you are correct, fill out the new data table, recording the counts in order of occurrence. 

TimeLocation A  LightLocation A DarkLocation B LightLocation B  Dark
Oldest – First



Second




Third




Most Recent – Fourth



6. Use colored pencils to prepare a bar graph based on the data that shows the distribution of the mice at locations A and B through time. Be sure to provide an appropriate title for the graph, and titles and labels for the x- and y-axes. You may record all of your data for each time period (A and B) on one bar graph or split A and B and make two graphs.

QUESTIONS 

1. Explain why a rock pocket mouse’s color influences its overall fitness. Remember that “fitness” is defined by an organism’s ability to survive and produce offspring. 

2. Explain the presence of dark-colored mice at location A. Why didn’t this phenotype become more common in the population? 

3. Write a scientific summary that describes changes in the rock pocket mouse populations at location B. Your summary should include 

• a description of how the population has changed over time, 

• an explanation of what caused the changes, and 

• a prediction that describes what the population will look like 100 years in the future. Base your prediction on trends in the data you have organized. You can assume that environmental conditions do not change over the 100 years. 

4. Use the data and what you have learned about evolution to explain how mutation is a random process, but natural selection is not random. 


Binder Check: Genetic Drift & Natural Selection 10/4

Make sure you have all your tabs, and each tab is in order. Newest stuff first.

All previous binder check assignments keep behind current binder check. Make sure when I open the tab I see the following in order:

Bellwork

  1. Week of 9/30>music
  2. Week of 9/23>owls
  3. Week of 9/16>monster

Notes

  1. Natural Selection Vocab
  2. Mechanisms of Evolution (The Hand)
  3. Genetic Drift Vocab
  4. Genetic Drift Reading
  5. Cornell Notes–Genetic Drift

Assignments

  1. Stations
  2. CER–Memory (1st and 2nd only)
  3. Marty the Martian

Labs

  1. Peppered Moths Simulation
  2. Driftworms
  3. Thirsty Birds Data Sheets (day 2 then day 1)

Natural Selection Reading

Natural selection Reading

Charles Darwin didn’t just propose that organisms evolved. If that had been the beginning and end of his theory, he wouldn’t be in as many textbooks as he is today! Instead, Darwin also proposed a mechanism for evolution: natural selection. This mechanism explained how populations could evolve in such a way that they became better suited to their environments over time.

Darwin’s concept of natural selection was based on several key observations:

  • Traits are often heritable. In living organisms, many characteristics are inherited, or passed from parent to offspring. (Darwin knew this was the case, even though he did not know that traits were inherited through genes.)
https://ka-perseus-images.s3.amazonaws.com/e39144e9fa7c35f0cea3f99544ce349d6067d4f5.png
  • More offspring are produced than can survive. Organisms are capable of producing more offspring than their environments can support. Thus, there is competition for limited resources in each generation.
https://ka-perseus-images.s3.amazonaws.com/01f4d8d205ba3fc9ba8ae6e52b826fbfb426a65a.png
  • Offspring vary in their heritable traits. The offspring in any generation will be slightly different from one another in their traits (color, size, shape, etc.), and many of these features will be heritable.
https://ka-perseus-images.s3.amazonaws.com/4e357288b6a67d51562c65a66ef77ef82d2667b1.png

Based on these simple observations, Darwin concluded the following:

  • In a population, some individuals will have inherited traits that help them survive and reproduce. The individuals with the helpful traits will leave more offspring in the next generation than their peers, since the traits make them more effective at surviving and reproducing.
  • Because the helpful traits are heritable, and because organisms with these traits leave more offspring, the traits will tend to become more common in the next generation.
  • Over generations, the population will become adapted, or become adjusted to new conditions or the environment.

Darwin’s model of evolution by natural selection allowed him to explain the patterns he had seen during his travels. For instance, if the Galápagos finch (a type of bird) species shared a common ancestor, it made sense that they should broadly look like one another. If groups of finches had been isolated on separate islands for many generations, however, each group would have been exposed to a different environment in which different heritable traits might have been favored; for example different sizes and shapes of beaks for using different food sources. These factors could have led to the formation of clear differences of species on each island.

Here are explanations which may help you get a better sense of how, when, and why natural selection takes place.

Natural selection depends on the environment

Natural selection favors traits that are beneficial that is, they help an organism survive and reproduce more effectively than its peers in a specific environment. Traits that are helpful in one environment might actually be harmful in another. 

Natural selection acts on existing heritable variation

For natural selection to act on a feature, there must already be variation, or differences among individuals for that feature. Also, the differences have to be heritable, determined by the organisms’ genes. 

Heritable variation comes from random mutations

The original source of the new gene variants that produce new heritable traits, such as fur colors, is random mutation. 

Welcome to Biology!

Hello, and welcome to Biology! I am Mrs. Meeker and periodically I will update with reminders of upcoming events in class. Feel free to subscribe by putting in your email address in the right column.

This past week we had our first quiz and binder check. Since it was our first binder check I will allow students to redo the organization and we will talk about opportunities to retake this quiz. Retakes will have to be after school and not during class time.

This week we will be starting the first major unit on Evolution, and we will be doing a modeling lab to demonstrate some of the evolutionary concepts we will learn about.

Feel free to email with questions and I am excited for a great year at Dearborn High!

Meeker

email: meekera@dearbornschools.org