Breeding Bunnies: Natural Selection By: Alyssa Shell Group Members: Polama, Danielle, Athena

Introduction
Natural selection affects the gene frequency over many generations of a population. Charles Darwin is an English naturalist and geologist that is known for his evolution theories. Natural selection is Darwins theory of evolution based on reproduction, variations, inheritance, and benefits of certain traits in an environment. (GlencoeScience.) There are a few types of natural selection. They are Directional Selection, Disruptive Selection, and Stabilizing Selection. Directional Selection is a type of natural selection that supports one extreme phenotype over another extreme. It usually occurs in an environmental change. Some examples would be like a change in the climate or food availability. A Second thing that speeds up directional selection is human interaction. When people go hunting, they usually kill the big individuals of the population which leaves the population with the smaller individuals. The second type is disruptive selection. Disruptive selection is a process that individuals with typical traits are removed which then creates two populations with extreme traits just like directional selection; Disruptive selection can be caused by human interactions such as environmental pollution. The third type of natural selection that I mentioned is called Stabilizing Selection. This type of selection favors the normal individuals in a certain population. The diversity of a certain population decreases due to this natural selection. Stabilizing Selection works on traits that are polygenic which means more than just one gene controls the phenotype. (evolution.about.com.) An adaptation helps us to understand how natural selection changes gene frequencies over time. Adaptations are inherited traits of a species that is developed over time due to an environmental factor. A type of adaptations is called morphological adaptation. The way I think of a

morphological adaptation is that it morphs into whatever it needs to due to certain conditions. Mimicry is a type of morphological adaptation. This is when one species evolves to favor another species. (evolution.berkeley.edu) A second type of morphological adaptation is camouflage. Camouflage allows a species to blend in with their environments. This type of adaptation makes it so an organism becomes invisible to the predators which helps it to survive and can reproduce. A way to determine how effective a trait contributes to reproductive success is by measuring fitness. Fitness is a measure of the reasonable contribution a trait makes to the next generation. (GlencoeScience.) In our lab we used beans to represent bunnies. What we did was we would put all the white and all the black beans into one cup. There were 50 of each. Each time we would take two out at a time. When we chose two black it represented the FF allele (they have fur) of a bunny, if you chose one black and one white bean it represented Ff which still means they have fur, and if you took to white it represented the allele ff. This means the bunny doesnt have fur. Before I go on an allele is a variation of genes. The letters FF, Ff, and ff show which trait is dominant and what trait is recessive. The dominant trait is show by the capital letter while the recessive trait is shown as a lower case letter. The set of letters is known as a genotype. (library.thinkquest.org.) Furless bunnies are rarely found in the wild in England. This is because they are not able to survive in harsh cold winters. Before you start the lab you need to know how to determine the total number of alleles for each generation. All you do is take the number of the fur alleles (F) plus the number of the furless alleles (f.) There are three possible allele combinations a bunny can inherit for fur. They are FF, Ff, and ff. The dominant trait for bunnies is the bunnies with fur. I think that as time passes the amount of no fur bunnies will continue to decrease. I think after a while that the no fur trait will eventually die off. In this lab we will learn how natural selection affects gene frequencies through several generations.

Another thing is that as you pick the beans you arent supposed to look at what youre picking. This is because you want it to be random so that your data is more accurate. If you were to look as you picked out the beans you could make the data look like you wanted it to. It would not be very realistic if we chose the beans we wanted to. In the real world you cant choose which bunnies you want to survive. While you do the lab you have to grab a pair of beans without looking so that you will have real data and you will be able to understand how it happens.

Conclusion
After doing this lab we concluded that as time passes the trait of no fur bunnies has begun to dissolve. As generations passed the amount of no fur bunnies decreased by a significant amount. We noticed that the number of fur bunnies stayed the same but the number of the no fur bunnies was the ones that changed, this was because the no fur bunnies are the ones that died. The no fur bunnies could not live very long especially if they lived in cold environments. If you look at our lab chart you will notice many things. The first generation started out with 50 white beans and 50 black beans. When we drew out of the cup to till all the beans were gone we noticed that only 79 out of the 100 survived. All 50 of the black beans survived, but only 29 of the white survived. When we moved onto generation two, we left the bunnies that died out of the cup because obviously they cant come back to life. This time when we finished drawing pairs of two we ended up with 68 bunnies surviving. Once again all 50 of the black beans survived but this time only 18 of the white did. Next thing you know we were on the third generation. Due to all the bunnies we started out with less. We ended up with 63 total surviving, all the black beans but only 13 of the white. As generation four passed we were down to only 59 of the bunnies surviving. After generation four, generations 5-7 got the same results. There were only 7 left of the white beans and total bunnies that survived were 57. As you can tell the number of white beans continued to decrease as time passed. We noticed this was due to natural selection. The trait of bunnies with fur made it so more bunnies survived and could reproduce. This trait was very helpful to the species. Like I stated in my hypothesis if the no fur bunnies continued to die then the furless allele would die off. If we were to continue this experiment eventually we would have very few or none of the white beans left over. The dominant allele in

this experiment never changed, yet the recessive allele decreased. Obviously this is because the recessive allele was the no fur while the dominant allele was the fur. There were many correlations in this experiment. In fact as the gene frequency of the fur allele increased the gene frequency of the no fur allele decreased. Again this is because of all the bunnies that died. It caused the frequency of the allele that helped the species survive to increase. This simulation definitely shows an example of evolution. As time passed, bunnies lost their furless trait which means that over time the population changed. This population would not be in Hardy-Weinburg equilibrium. This is because the Hardy-Weinburg Principle says that the genotypic frequencies in a population will remain constant over time. As you can tell this lab shows the total opposite of that. As many generations passed the gene frequency for the no fur allele kept on getting smaller and smaller and smaller. This lab definitely shows how natural selection affects the gene frequencies of a trait over several generations. If the gene frequency for a trait were to remain the same many bunnies would continue to die every year because bunnies cannot survive without fur. They are not able to last long. As mentioned in the introduction many adaptations are cause by environmental change. Bunnies without fur are able to survive warm weathers, but when cold weather comes along they are in trouble. The fur trait has helped out the bunny species. In this lab over 7 generations you can see that a trait that does not work will eventually die off. If you look at the graph, it shows the correlation of what happened in the lab. As the dominant allele increased by a lot, the recessive allele decreased by a lot.

Data Analysis:
This Graph shows the correlation between the dominant and recessive allele in the bunny lab. As the dominant increases the recessive decreases.

Works Cited "Adaptation." Evolution 101:. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. Biggs, Alton. Glencoe. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2008. Print. "Directional Selection." About.com Evolution. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. "Disruptive Selection." About.com Evolution. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. "Stabilizing Selection." About.com Evolution. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.