Evolutionary Response to Rapid Climate Change

Jasmine O’Connor

Article Reflection 2

1. Climate change can affect an animal, its way of living, and its genes. These rapid climate changes can cause animals to mate and mature earlier then they are supposed to. Making the animal food chain change in significant ways. Eventually causing genetic changes with these organisms; such as, laying their eggs earlier to continue their reproduction cycle. (Bradshaw and Holzapfel 2006.)

2. Phenotypic plasticity is where an individual or organism can change their own traits. (Bradshaw and Holzapfel 2006.) A genetic change in the population is the population adapting to the environment based on predators, weather, and landscape. In the second paragraph of the article, it brings up the change in the season for caterpillars. The spring comes earlier making the butterflies lay their eggs earlier allowing the eggs to hatch in time for the birds to hatch out of their eggs. This cannot be phenotypic plasticity because the butterflies have no sense of when they lay their eggs, they lay them when the weather starts to warm up. When the temperature goes up, that’s when the butterflies lay their eggs. (Bradshaw and Holzapfel 2006.)

3. Mutations could have occurred between the six clones. They could have changed their genotypes to be able to survive through the experiment. Natural selection could have also occurred because the environment could be too harsh for some clones. With natural selection, some clones could have died off leaving only the ones who were able to stand the environment. (Lohbeck et al. 2012.)

4. This shows that the clones do get impacted by some mechanisms that make the results come out the way they do. The clones have to manipulate themselves in some way to have only a certain amount stay until the end. (Lohbeck et al. 2012.)  If the experiment was repeated exactly the same and got the same results back, the experiment would be very believable. Having the same results would make the conclusion really strong because it makes the experiment more reliable when someone questions.