One of the effects of climate change on ecological communities is the disruption of seasonal timing or phenology. A team of biologists is trying to determine the potential for rapid evolutionary responses of plants to changing seasonal conditions. They do a laboratory selection experiment on flowering time in an annual plant to test for the presence of additive genetic variance for this trait. They measure the time between germination and flowering for 400 plants under controlled laboratory conditions and then use 25% with the shortest flowering times to find a second generation in the lab (with pollination based on random number sampling). The mean flowering time for the overall parental population was 80 days. The mean for the selected 25% of individuals was 60 days. In the offspring generation, the mean flowering time was 70 days. 6a. What is the narrow-sense heritability for flowering time for these plants under laboratory conditions? 6b. If you performed another round of selection on the initial offspring generation - again with a selected mean of 60 days, what would you expect the mean flowering time to be in the resulting 3rd generation (assuming that narrow-sense heritability hasn’t changed substantially)? 6c. Thinking about what you know about some basic features of natural selection, why might the assumption mentioned in 6b not completely hold up if we were doing this experiment in real life?

Human Anatomy & Physiology (11th Edition)

11th Edition

ISBN:9780134580999

Author:Elaine N. Marieb, Katja N. Hoehn

Publisher:Elaine N. Marieb, Katja N. Hoehn

Chapter1: The Human Body: An Orientation

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 1RQ: The correct sequence of levels forming the structural hierarchy is A. (a) organ, organ system,...

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One of the effects of climate change on ecological communities is the disruption
of seasonal timing or phenology. A team of biologists is trying to determine the potential for
rapid evolutionary responses of plants to changing seasonal conditions. They do a
laboratory selection experiment on flowering time in an annual plant to test for the presence of
additive genetic variance for this trait. They measure the time between germination and
flowering for 400 plants under controlled laboratory conditions and then use 25% with the
shortest flowering times to find a second generation in the lab (with pollination based on
random number sampling). The mean flowering time for the overall parental population was 80
days. The mean for the selected 25% of individuals was 60 days. In the offspring generation, the
mean flowering time was 70 days.

6a. What is the narrow-sense heritability for flowering time for these plants under laboratory
conditions?

6b. If you performed another round of selection on the initial offspring generation - again with a
selected mean of 60 days, what would you expect the mean flowering time to be in the resulting
3rd generation (assuming that narrow-sense heritability hasn’t changed substantially)?

6c. Thinking about what you know about some basic features of natural selection, why might the
assumption mentioned in 6b not completely hold up if we were doing this experiment in real
life?

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