lab 2 Flashcards
What is a phenotype?
Outward appearance
What is a genotype?
The complete genetic constituency.
They contain blueprints of the phenotypic traits
What are continious phenotypic traits result of?
Ex height, and colour are the result of interactions between multiple genes and often the environment
What increases fitness?
Individuals ability to respond to the environement.
Individual exploiting the appropriate combination of phenotype and environment will gain the highest fitness.
What is acclimitation?
Altering the phenotype is known as acclimation. It occurs in individuals who are able to modify their phenotype in response to environmental variation in a manner that increases their fitness.
Who can adapt? Individuals or populations?
-Only populations can adapt, individuals can only acclimate
What is phenotype plasticity?
The ability of one genotype to produce different phenotypes in different environments. (the degree to which a given genotype can alter its phenotypic expression to acclimate to its surroundings)
What are two ways plasticity is expressed?
- Discrete alternate: Either red or green flowers
- Continuum: Like the nodules produced are inversely proportional to the nitrogen available
What is reaction norm?
When phenotypic plasticity is expresses itself in a contimuum the relationship between the environment and the trait in the question is known as a reaction norm.
Why aren’t all traits phenotypically plastic?
One reason is that not insufficient genetic variation exists for the evolution to occur.
or alternatively, even if sufficient variation exists for the evoluion of plasticity, sosts and limitations, may result in a selectively pressure against a trait evolving phenotypic plasticity.
or genes promoting plasticity might be linked to genes conferring a low fitness for other traits.
Is trait to be plastic a heritable triat?
True
