Megan McCoy

A trait on an animal that has always fascinated me is the pouch on a kangaroo. I always thought it was more like a pocket on the outside of the kangaroos stomach, but it looks and seems a whole lot more intricate than that. It is a fold on the skin that is exclusive to females. The pouch is hairless on the inside and allows the offspring to feed off the mother's milk. The pouch covers their breasts, and due to this it forms an epidermal bag which takes the role of an incubator. This is an adaptation that enables the offspring to be cared for at different stages of their life/development. They use this pouch to carry their babies and nurse them while still being quite mobile. Something that was very new to me was that the inside lining of the pouch is lined with sweat glands that release antimicrobial liquid. This is to ensure the health and safety of the offspring. 

The definition of genetic variation is the difference in the sequence of genes between the individuals and organisms in a species. We also see that natural selection is the process where organisms that are better suited for the environment they live in tend to survive and produce more offspring. In a sense, genetic variation drives natural selection. Natural selection would not be possible without a genetic difference in genes within a population.  There is a clear answer as to why natural selection has not eroded genetic variation over time, and the answer is mutations. If natural selection has taken place within a population, that does not stop the fact that mutations will still take place. This creates a whole new genetic variation amongst the population over generations. It creates a new gene pool and starts the process all over again. Mutations occur and they could be for the better of the population. In this case natural selection will take place and create a population ...

     Coming into this class I definitely was not expecting to code or learn in this sort of way. It made me really nervous because as a biology major, I have never had to even look at code before. At the beginning I definitely struggled with the R exercises, but I feel as the weeks go on I get more comfortable using Rstudio. Although I don't feel as intimidated by R anymore, I still have questions about certain codes on our exercises. It is definitely a challenge, but it is a new way of learning for me.      Looking back on my first blog post, I related evolution to adaptation and natural selection. Although that response isn't necessarily wrong, I now know it is much more intricate and deeper than that. I basically thought that evolution and natural selection were the same thing, but now I understand that natural selection drives evolution to take place. There are many working parts in order for evolution to occur and one that fascinates me the m...

Inbreeding:       Inbreeding is the production of offspring from the breeding of individuals that are genetically closely related to one another. According to the internet, it says that assortative mating is where individuals with similar genetic makeup mate with each other more frequently than a random mating pattern. A benefit of inbreeding could be in the circumstance where two organisms are both genetically fit for its own environment and thrive under those circumstances. Those two organisms can mate, and create an offspring that has a great overall fitness to survive in that habitat as well. This could create a larger population.      Inbreeding also has some negative effects as well. Disassortative mating is a pattern in which individuals with very different phenotypes mate with one another more frequently than random mating. This reduces the genetic similarities in a population and produces more heterozygotes. Some of the negative effects t...