Tusklessness Flashcards
Limiting Factors
Any biotic or abiotic factor that restricts the existence, numbers, reproduction, or distribution of organisms.
selective pressure on elephants
Poaching is selecting elephants without tusks. The population in Africa is increasingly made up of tuskless females.
Natural Selection
A process in which individuals that have certain inherited traits tend to survive and reproduce at higher rates than other individuals because of those traits.
Adaptation
inherited characteristic that increases an organism’s chance of survival
Keystone species
A species that influences the survival of many other species in an ecosystem
What evidence shows that there are genetic variations among species?
tusklessness among female elephamts, genetic mutation
Explain what would cause the proportion of a trait to change in a population. (Hint: selective pressure)
In areas with poaching, tuskless elephants are not as poached as tusked elephants, therefore more tuskless elephants survive and are able to pass down that gene, making it more common and more likely for them to mate with another tusked elephant.
why can tuskless elephants still be killed
The tuskless elephants who had their meat poached were killed for their meat as it can be very valuable. The ones whose meat were intact were most likely killed for their skin as their skins are valuable and can be useful for certain medicine. It could also be from sheer human cruelty.
why are tuskless elephants increasing?
bc elephants with tusks are being killed so the tuskless elephants are slowly overwhelming the amount of tuskked elephants. so this gene is slowly becoming more dominant and since there’s less tusked elephants, there would be a greater chance of two tuskless elephants mating therefore making tusklessness a more dominant gene.
is tusklessness a natural trait
yes
