Biology Set 1

It actually looks more than it actually is, especially if we take it one little chunk at a time. All right? Okay, so the first thing that we're going to do is review the different steps of evolution, which you may have already gone over. At some point, but this is a refresher. So the step one is that there's an overpopulation. There are more organisms or life forms that are produced than can be supported by the environment. You know, if you have too many people in one area, you start running out of water or food. Then goes to step two, variation. Organisms are born with different variations of genes that give different traits. So as the organisms reproduce, you start getting some that have longer necks, some that have shorter necks. In the case of drafts, you have your brown hair, your blond hair, your brown eye, your darker skin, your shorter people, your different kinds of variations. That leads to step three. Competition. With all of those organisms around, they're going to battle for the limited resources. 

There's only so much water to go around. So step four happens, selection. The organisms that have the different trees in the variations that are best adapted to survive. Will live and pass on genes for that trait. Then come step 5, adaptation. That beneficial treat that we discussed will be passed on and becomes the most prominent or dominant trait in the population. So height gives an advantage, those people will survive and pass on that trait. And then become step 6 speciation, the adaptation builds up and leads to a new species that is reproductively different from any other. So this is an example of that evolutionary cycle. We have the giraffes, some of them have shorter necks, some of them have longer necks, and you see there's limited food. Foods all on the one tree. So what they do is the ones that have the longer necks, survive, and they're able to reach that tree. They're able to get the leaves and eat and live. And, so that trait is passed on, and you end up with zebras or dress that all have long necks. Natural selection of the Galapagos finches. 

Please read along as I'm reading this out loud, all right? The Galapagos are strange and wonderful islands. This string of volcanic mountain tops rise out of the Pacific Ocean floor, about a thousand kilometers or 600 miles off the coast of South America at the equator. When these islands first emerged from the sea floor, they were simply lifeless piles of lava rocks. About 3 million years ago, new species began to arrive. The barren lava soils, equatorial heat, sparse rain, and isolation, make this a very harsh world to survive in. Only some species have the equipment to live in these tough conditions, making it home to some unique plants and animals. These extreme conditions make the Galapagos very interesting to biologists. No two animals are exactly alike. Differences between organisms of the same species and features like size, color, and abilities are called variations. Usually variations are slight and don't make much difference. 

Sometimes a variation will give one creature an advantage over another. Rosemary and Peter grant have visited the Galapagos every year for more than 30 years. They returned to the island of Daphne major to count the finches and band newly hatched birds. This puts them on a first name basis with the finches that live on Daphne major. The grants pay attention to variations between each Finch on the island. Learn how they measure Finch beaks and discover some variations for yourself. The grants take precise measurements of their favorite Finch, the medium ground Finch, geosphere, Fortis. You will be using a ruler to measure beaks from the pictures of medium ground finishes that are ten times larger than life. Obviously, you will not have a ruler because you do not have the physical packet. So I went ahead and filled in the centimeters portion of the chart. So what we're going to do is follow these steps. And we're going to analyze Finch beaks in terms of their size. So first up is to measure the beak depth and centimeters. 

They have arrows on each of the birds that will measure from to be seen, see the depth. And then we will record the measurements on a table. And then we're going to convert the measurements to millimeters by multiplying centimeters by ten. So if you have 1.4 centimeters, you multiply it by ten. You just move the decimal point over one and become 14 millimeters. And then we're going to answer the questions. Now, like I said, I know that you don't have a paper copy of the packet, so you can't really measure the finches beaks. So I went ahead and bit that. So these are the pictures of the finches that were in your packet. They are a little shrunk down. But we are measuring from arrow to arrow, and you can see where the red lines were drawn. That's the thickness that we're talking about. For their beaks. And you can see just by looking at them, that some of them are a bit wider, a bit bigger than others. So we're looking at that and we're going to make a chart, and then we're going to answer some questions. Our chart takes each of those finches. They have a number assigned to them. And I already measured their centimeter with, and I wrote it into the chart. So number one zero 7 5 has a beaked depth of 7.4 centimeters. 

Now you have to go and take your calculator, or if you can do it in your head, that's awesome. And right in the beak depth and millimeter. So you multiply by ten. 7.4 becomes 74. On your paper, you should make a chart, a very similar to this one. You should have three columns. You should have one, two, three, four, 5, 6, 7 rows. And fill it out just like this. And then right in the millimeters. You should probably pause now. All right, I hope you've paused the video and were able to fill out the chart. Underneath that, you're going to write cinches, so we know which questions you're answering. And then question a how many different beak sizes did you find? You don't need to rewrite the question. Just write down your answer. How many of those beak sizes were different? And then write B, what was the size in millimeters of the largest beak E measured? So find the largest peak on the chart, and find out what the millimeter number is and write that after B for C, what was the size and millimeters of the smallest beak that you measured? Same thing, go to the chart, find the smallest size, and write that number in. 

What is the difference in millimeters between the size of the largest and the smallest beaks that you measured? So D wants you to find the difference. The difference means subtraction. You're taking the largest number, which is B, and you're subtracting the smallest number, which is C so whatever number you have for B minus whatever number you have for C and that will be the number that you write in D and then finally, this is the part where you're going to have to think. For part E, do you think that variation in beak size matter for survival? Why or why not? So you're going to have to consider looking at those beaks and looking at the sizes of the how big they are. How could that affect how the bird lives? Well, my first thought is that a bird's beak, that's how they eat. And that's how they sing. I don't think that the size of the beak will really affect how they sing or communicate. So I'm going to think about in terms of how they eat. Could there be a reason maybe that a finches beak might be narrower or might be bigger? Could they access something easier? If you think about those things and try and synthesize it and put it into a sentence. I think the beak size matters for survival because and then explain. You can definitely use the thoughts that I came up with. So you might want to pause your video as you write this down on your sheet of paper. Remember, this should be a complete sentence. 

So you should have four numbers, a, B, C, and D, and then you should have a sentence under E. And guess what? You are done both assignment one and two, that was pretty easy, right? All we had to do was review evolution and then you had to fill out a chart and answer thought questions. So hopefully we'll be able to get done the next bit and in one day. Take a break now if you need it. You can get something to drink, stretch it out. You can even watch a little bit of a TV show. But we're going to come back to work soon, right? Okay. And we're back with the next part of this assignment. Survival on Daphne major. So remember to read along as I read it out loud, okay? The scientists on Daphne major observe everything on the island, and they keep a careful record of their data. In 1977 and 1978, they recorded a spell of over 500 days in which no rain fell. 

During this extremely dry period, many plants failed to produce seeds. Investigate some measurements from the scientists field notes. Turn their data into graphs to get a picture of what happened to the food supply, and the Finch population after the drought. The observers on Daphne major tracked seed abundance by first measuring a square meter area of ground, and then sifting through the soil to count every seed. This was done at many different places to get an accurate count. They repeated the count every 6 months. So we're taking what we know about the seed abundance and the scientists and their field notes and we're going to graph it a little bit of mass still was going on here. We see this table here that has year month and seat abundance. We know they measured every 6 months, so we have January, July, January July, January, July, from three different years. And then they have the seed abundance. And that, according to the table, it says it's in grams per square meter, which means they measured that where they took a square meter and they sifted out all the seeds, and they counted up the number seeds, and then they averaged that. 

For several different areas on the island. And they found that, for instance, in 1976, in January, they found a seed abundance of 7.5 grams per square meter. Every square meter of dirt only had 7.5 grams of seed. Now we're going to take that information and we're going to graph it onto a graph. You'll need to take your paper and you're going to have to recreate the graph not the table with the numbers in it. You don't need to rewrite that. So first thing, you need to draw a line going across for your X axis. And that's going to be the drought in terms of the days, the month and the year. And you're going to have a Y axis draw it vertical draw up. And that'll be the grams of seed per square meter on Daphne major. Now you see that the month and year, they have it every 6 months, so there are 6 lines going upwards. One from January 1976, one from July 1976, one from January 1977. And so on. So draw those 6 lines going up. And then you'll see the Y axis is divided by ones, zero, one, two, three, four, 5, 6 all the way up to 11. And draw horizontal lines across. Your chart should look similar to the one that's on the screen. Now we have to swap the line graph to do that. We will look at our table. And you can see that on the table it says, like we discussed earlier in January of 1976, there were 7.5 seed grams per meter for seed. So if we go to January of 1976, which is our first vertical line, and we go up to 7.5, one, two, three, four, 5, 6, 7, and then somewhere between 7 and 8, we're going to put a dot. Right there. And that is our first figure. 

Then we're going to July 1976, and in the number is 10.5. So you're going to start down at zero, zero, one, two, three, four, 5, 6, all the way up to ten and it says it's a half, so it's between ten and 11. We're going to put a point there. And you're going to continue to do that until each of the vertical lines has a dot on it. Every date has its seat abundance number. And then connect the dots. In the end, you're going to have something that looks like a little bit of a mountain peak at the beginning, and then it goes down, down, down, down, and then a little bit back up. Now we're going to have to make another graph this time it's going to be for Finch population. So go ahead and on your piece of paper, draw another graph. Our X axis is again the 6 different months that they measured. And then our Y axis this time, the line going up is the Finch population. So they're measuring the number of finches, and you see that they do it by two hundredths. So every line going up is an increment of 200. Go ahead and pause this while you draw your graph on your paper. And then you're going to have to take the information from the table and put it on the graph and connect the dots just like we did before. So our first point is 1976, January, and it says 1100. So I'm going starting at the bottom at zero for January 1976, go up 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000, and it said it was 1100, so I know that's right between 1001 1200. So I'll put my dot right in between the two. And then I'm going to do the same for all 5 other dates. Yeah, 1100 for a January 1976. 1400 for July. 850 for January 1977, 400 for July. 200 for January 1978 and 357 for July. And in the end, take a look at what once you connect your gods, what it looks like, you probably look, again, like a mountain, goes up to a mountain peak, and then down down, down, and then up just a little bit. So I'm familiar.

 So, so far you have your two graphs that you have drawn out and recorded the numbers on and made the lines. And you're kind of seeing how they're similar, right? We're going to analyze it now. Our question number one, underneath your bar graphs, or sorry, your line graphs, put number one. And then it asks, when is the seed supply the lowest and when was it the highest? Looking on your chart, find the point that is closest to the X axis. The one that's closest to zero, and what's that number? So you take that number and you're going to put lowest equals that number. And then you have to say, when was that? So when was that? Is it January, July, what year? Write that next to it. And then the highest you're going to do highest equals, and then find that number right in. And then what day it is, is it January, is it July, what year? So we have two numbers with the dates on them for number one. Number two, when was the Finch population the lowest and the highest? You doing the same thing as you did for number one, except this time you're looking at your second graph. What month and year was it the lowest number? What month and year was it the highest number? Now number three, what happened to the Finch population when the seed supply shrank to its lowest amount? Why do you think that is? Compare the graphs. So when we looked at our graphs before and I said, um, they look similar, right? And now you have your answers to number one and two. 

And you have your numbers when it was the lowest and when it was the highest. Was the lowest of the Finch population at the same time, the seed supply was at the lowest. Were they opposite? So it was the highest Finch population. No, it was the lowest, right? So when the seed supply was low and there wasn't much sea going around, there was less Finch population. So you need to think about that. Why do you think that is? Why would less seeds equal less finches? The number four, you're thinking the opposite when the seed supply increased, what happened to the finches and why? Look at the graphs and look at the numbers. Are they do they correlate? Do they increase the same time? Do they not? Why do you think that happens? Why would if there's more seed supply, the Finch population be a certain amount? And then finally, number 5, when the team returned to Daphne manger, they found only one in 7 finches survived the drought. When they measured the survivors, they found that most were finches with big beaks. Why do you think bigger beaked birds survived better than the smaller beaked birds? This goes back to before when it was talking about the beak measurements, and it was asking, why might you have different beak measurements? And I was thinking, maybe it has something to do with food and eating. 

So think about that. What could the beak measurements indicate? Why might bigger burp beaked birds? Tongue twister. Why might they have a better time getting the seeds than the smaller beaked birds? And we have more questions this might be the longest section that you have to do today. So beak size is a variation that is passed from parents to offspring. When the new generation of young finches was measured in 1978, there were many more young birds with larger beaks. What happened? Well, if you think about it, we said that there was that drought between 1976 and 1977, 78, and we said, how many what was most likely to survive? The big beaked birds. So if there were more surviving and we know that beak size is passed down from parents to offspring, what happened, I think you can figure that out. And write it in a sentence. Then number 7, how did this group of finches studied on Daphne major in the Galápagos Islands demonstrate the steps of evolution or for back to page one on the packet or in this case that first chart that we went over? Remember, we have our first step over population. How does the Finch group represent overpopulation? What's the largest number of finches of their work? Maybe that was too much. 

Think about it. So you can write down overpopulation is represented. By too many finches. And B, variation. Well, what were we measuring, what was our variation? And then C competition. What is it that they were competing over? Not water. The seeds, right? They needed more seeds. Food. So you can write they were competing over food. And then finally, selection. Who was it that had an easier time with the food? Which ones? I like that. And then add adaptation. So after all those that survived with the seeds, and what was the adaptation, what trait carried on, to the next generation. The good news is, after all of those questions you answered, you have one more part of the assignment done. All right, let's finish this up. So another aspect of evolution is called speciation. And that's when a species is defined as a group of similar individuals that can exchange genes through reproduction. But the question is, how do you organisms become different enough to be considered its own species? That's what speciation is. A population can become its own species, once it is reproductively isolated from another population of organisms. 

This means that the new group can not successfully breed with another group. This isolation can happen in 5 different ways. So here are the 5 different ways that this occurs. And we're going to be referring to this a lot. But I do have them on all the slides. The first one is ecological, and that's when they use different resources in their habitat. The next behavioral, that means they might have different mating rituals. Then there's mechanical. Now mechanical is when there's structural differences that prevent meeting or pollen transfer, so if the body type changes and they can no longer reproduce. Then there's temporal. That means meeting occurs at different seasons or time of day. And finally, geographic, and that one's the easiest I think to comprehend. That's when they're in different locations. Because if they're different locations, they are going to obviously grow separately. And you can see from this chart on the right that all the different branching happens when there's a specific type of isolation that occurs and you branch off with a new species. So for this exercise, what we're going to do is we have 8 different examples of speciation that we will be going through in the next few slides. And you're going to have to complete a chart. So you need to take your piece of paper and draw a chart. 

You have one column that has the species list, the next column is the description of the scenario. What is it that the information, the graphic or the text is telling you? The third column is the type of isolation. That's when we're going to choose from that list of 5 different types. And then finally the last column is evidence to support type of isolation. And that's where you use your second third column and you say, well, it is this type of isolation because in the scenario they lived in two different continents or they had two different meaning seasons. So take a moment, copy down this chart and make sure you have enough room to write. You might want to pause the video. All right, our first species that's up is the annul lizard. Annulled lizards are a highly diverse group with nearly 400 known species of which around 150 are found in the Caribbean. Male anoles usually keep their dewlaps or the throat flap hidden unless they are challenged by another male or need to impress a female. The dewlap of each annual species has a characteristic color and shape. The environment the lizard lives in, has influenced the coloring of these dewlaps in different species. Species that occupy shaded habitats tend to have yellow dewlaps, while those that inhabit brighter, less shaded habitats tend to have red or orange dewlaps. 

Natural backgrounds are formed by green vegetation. Modeling these two lap colors in a perceptual color space predicts that red is more visible against a green background than yellow. So that means all those words, if you look at the picture, you see all these different lizards and they're displaying their different dewlaps. And you can see the different colors being on display. And they're saying that when there is a brighter environment, you have the green backdrop of the green vegetation and you want to stand out, right? In order to attract a mate. So they end up having more of a red tone of red and orange because it stands out more against the green. So then you have to think, why would yellow stand out when it's not quite as bright out? If you think about it, if it's not bright and it's kind of more of a darker shaded area, colors are going to be more muted. Browns and blacks, right? Maybe a bunch of grays. So yellow will stand out a lot. And that environment. So look at, go ahead and summarize the scenario. About how they each have different throat colors and why. And then we're going to pick which one of the 5 it is, and this case, let's see here. Is it ecological? They utilize different resources. Is it behavioral? They have different mating rituals. Well, they all use their throat, do laughs, so that's not a different ritual. How about structural differences prevent meeting or pollen transfer? No, I mean, it's the color in size, but it's not necessarily the whole structure of the lizard. Temporal occurs during different seasons or time of day. It doesn't really mention that. How about geographic species occur in different locations? 

Well, I think that might be it because and this is would be the last column. I think it would be geographic because we're talking about the different habitats shaded versus unshaded, and what kind of vegetation there is. So there are different locations, there are different habitats, change the color of their dewlaps. Okay, the California salamander, this one does not have a bunch of text. So we're going to look at the pictures. We have in the middle. We have a picture of the salamander. A cute little fellow. On the right, we have a picture of the California and the central valley region. So that would be probably where they originate. And then on the left is what we're really going to look at. It shows a graph with this blue arrow and this red arrow going down Southern California and the central valley. The red kind of splits off to one side, the blue to the other. So I think that shows the differences in these species. We have, at the top number one, the original population started in the north and migrated southward. So far, so good, that's what we kind of predicted with those arrows. Number two. The population split into the east and west of the central valley. Then two populations began to evolve independently. So you can see with the arrows once pulled off to the east once split off to the west. 

Three, you have the evolution of the eastern population and the evolution of the western population. Looks like they are a different colors. And then finally four the east and west populations came back together in Southern California, but could no longer interbreed or produced infertile, hybrid offspring. So what was it what isolation is it that caused this? They use different resources. Do they have different behaviors? They have structural differences. From mechanical, the mating of her different seasons are times. Are they occur in different locations? Now this one is tricky because they were in different locations for a while. Yes, it says at least split around the central valley. But it's mentioning that they came back together and that's when they could no longer interbreed. Which tells me that it's mechanical because there's something structurally different that happened during that time that would prevent meeting. Okay, our next species is Bauer birds. So two populations of the bowerbirds build nests and decorate them in strikingly different ways. Females from each of the two populations prefer Bowers and decorations of males from their own population. 

So we have, if you can see the pictures on the left side, one of the birds, they both make their Bowers their nests in a certain structure, but the one on the left looks like they're using ribbon, like highly colorful ribbon like objects, maybe string more or grasses. And the one on the right, that bower, the female prefers it if the male decorates it with, it looks like flowers, like petals and yeah, maybe they went and they found some flowers to lay in front of the bower. So if we have these two different species of bowerbirds and they both, of course, given their name, use Bowers as their nests. But they decorate them differently. Is that ecological? They use different resources. No, I'm actually going to stop there. It sounds like it's ecological. If they use different resources in their habitat, the one uses the flowers, and the other one it looks like they try to use ribbon or string or some other form of like a grass. Our next animal is the toad. And this is again a picture and graph. We have on the left side American toads meet in early summer. And then Fowler's toads at the bottom mate in late summer. You can see, according to that graph, you have meeting activity versus the time of year and they have various frogs and toads represented. And I'm assuming looking at this that every peak of a mountain is the height of the mating season for that specific animal. 

So the bullfrog would be around July 1st. So if we look at this and we decide which of our 5 isolation habits created the speciation, if we're looking at mating during or at least summer versus late summer or the time of the year, and that should be, let's see, look through the list. And then mating occurs during different seasons or time of day. That's temporal. So we'll write that in our charts. Remember to on the second column right in the summary of what it is on the chart. And then write the type, and then on the last column, explain the Y. And here we have snails. In some snail species, the direction of shell coiling is controlled by a single maternal effect gene. Snails with left coiling shells can not mate with snails having right coiling shells. This could eventually lead to further differentiation and speciation. I don't know, here we're talking about the basic structure of the shell, one going left coiling, and one going right coiling, and that's what prevents them from being able to reproduce. So you should be able to figure out which of those 5 is the correct isolation type. And explain why. Here we have the rug elitist fly. Read along as I read out loud. The regolith fly and Hawthorne plants are native to North America. 

Raga leaders flies mate on the food source that they utilize. An environmental change occurred when apple trees were introduced around 300 years ago. Apples and Hawthorne trees are not geographically separated. Genetic differences have evolved between the flies that prefer Hawthorne for food versus apples for food in less than 300 years. So originally the flies would use the Hawthorne plant for food and as apple trees were introduced, apple cheese that says they were not geographically separated from Hawthorne trees, which means they're growing in the same areas. But some of the flies started preferring the apple trees. And then that causes a difference between them, a genetic difference in less than 300 years. So what is it that caused this isolation? And then hey, it's the finches of the Galápagos Islands. We learned about them earlier. Read along. Medium ground finches eat a range of food, including about two dozen kind of kinds of seeds. These seeds range from small soft ones to seeds on hard in hard shells that are tough to open. One of the toughest seeds on Daphne is from a plant called a tribulus. Seeds from tribulus are about 8 times harder to open than the soft seeds that finches also eat. Finches eat the easy food first. When soft seeds are plentiful, the finches dine on those. When soft seeds are not available, the finches resort to the harder to open seeds. The scientists undoubtedly major observed that only finches with bigger beaks are able to crack open the tough seeds like tribulus to get the food inside. 

So this answers some of our questions from earlier in terms of the beak size and the food source and how that might relate. So the harder it is to get into the seed, the bigger the beak it is needed to crack it. Which means now we have different species of finches, you can see the chart, there's a wide variety of them of different sizes and there are peaks or different shapes. So how might they have been isolated? What is it that changed for them? And here we have another bird, the tropical wren. Read along as I read out loud. Three isolated populations of white breasted wood wren used different phrases in their songs to attract meats. When the Costa Rica wrens, heard the songs of the Amazon wrens, they did not react. Apparently no longer able to recognize the Somme. The inference is that if these two populations can not communicate, they could not breed, and should be considered separate species. So they have a similar makeup in terms of how they look. And what they eat and so on. But they've developed different mating songs. So what type of isolation leads to the speciation in this example? And congratulations more on our last step for this part. We need to choose one cross cutting concept which best aligns to our lesson on speciation and answer one question in the chosen box. So you're going to circle it and answer it in a space provided while you're going to get your paper in pencil. Three to 5 complete sentences are required. 

So we're not doing a short answer on this. We're actually writing a little bit of a response here. Now we can choose from patterns, stability, and change, systems, structure, and function, energy, and cause and effect. So for example, then you can use this if you would like. I think I would choose cause and effect. Because we were talking about with speciation how you have the same species and something happens to it. Something causes a difference between parts of the population and the effect is a separate species. So I'm going to choose cause and effect. So your goal is to write about one of those questions in the box. In my example, I said cause and effect, well, what evidence is there for a cause and effect relationship? The first thing I'm going to do is I would define it and say speciation is an example of cause and effect. I start off my essay stating what I'm going to prove. And then I want to go and define what causes. And then I'm going to say effect is and define effect. And then we want to go and tie that in with speciation. We can see cause in speciation when, and then I can use an example. 

An example of this is think about all of the different animals that we went over. We see effect in speciation when, in this case, what kind of differences have happened with species. An example of this is think about all the ones that we went over. And then you have to wrap it up with a final sentence. Because we see this, we know that, and then you just basically restate what it is you're proving. At this point, you should have a couple of questions, answered. You should have several charts drawn out and plotted or filled in. You should have a small paragraph written out. Take a picture of all of those things and send them my way. You can text me or email me. My email is on the screen. My phone number for texting is on the screen. If you can get through this end, finish them all up, send them my way, and I will make sure they get to miss wolford. We will continue on with the next batch of biology work. Remember, we can do this. We can get this done. You're going to pass for the year. I know it.