Part 13: No Blog Post

Introduction

My name is Carmen Del Real, I am from the Old Wild West (Dodge City, Kansas). Although I'm a Kansan, I've lived in California and often travel to Mexico. My friends and I on Highway 50, when we went Pokemon hunting. I am passionate about education and healthcare. I currently work as a Certified Surgical Technologist and volunteer at the Flint Hills Community Center as a Medical Interpreter. What fascinates me about biology is definitely physiology! I learned to really appreciate evolution. I often think about how the tools that we use and how the food that we consume affects humans and if our bodies will eventually be able to adapt. For example, highly processed food is known to be a contributor to diseases such as diabetes. Will our bodies adapt to did or is this something that can eliminate the humans or shall I say Homo sapiens. During this semester, hope to learn how evolution is currently changing ...

Part 10: Sexual Dimorphism in Female Pipefish

Module 10: Sexual Selection How is it possible for female pipefish ( Microphis deocata ) to court a male pipefish when is often the opposite? Figure 1: Female pipefish ( Microphis deocata ) [1] In class we learned that sexual selection explains sex differences so this evolutionary force must act differently in each sex. Often males tend to court a female because typically females are able to be choosy when selecting their mates. My hypothesis: Sexual Dimorphism in female pipefish demonstrates that low variation in fitness and weak sexual selection is found in males leading to female pipefish to compete by advertising for mates as they now get chosen due to intersexual selection. In the family of Syngnathidae, including pipefishes, have male pregnancy. This predisposes males to limit female reproductive success leading sexual selection to act more strongly on females with leads to female-female competition and male choice (reversed sex role) in pipefish...

Evolutionary Fitness: How to Measure It

Natural Selection is a process of sorting by the reproductive success that occurs in populations of replicating units. Where units can be defined as molecules, cells, organisms, or larger units. There are four conditions for natural selection to occur: (1) the units expressing the trait must vary in their reproductive success; (2) the trait must vary among the units in the population; (3) the correlation between the trait and reproductive success must be nonzero (i.e. positive correlation with reproductive success will yield an increase in frequency and vice versa); and lastly (4) the trait must be heritable. Fitness is a measure of relative reproductive performance that can be used to predict long-term dynamics. In other words, fitness is an organism's ability to survive and reproduce to contribute genetically to the next generation. Heritable traits that have greater fitness will increase in a population subject to natural selectio...

Evolution Class Experience

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