Witness Adaptation's Wonders
Researcher
Simulation Developer
Researcher
Group Leader
Website Designer
Simulation Developer
Changes in a species’ ecosystem can significantly affect the animal living in it. Environmental changes such as climate change and the introduction of non-native species can threaten native species and force them to change their behaviour to avoid the aforementioned threats. Threats from non-native species for example, may affect the behaviour of species that are native from the area, such as changing their food patterns due to it being consumed by non-native species more. Climate change, for example, may also destroy ecosystems, forcing them to migrate to less suitable environments, causing them to change their way of life to adapt. Changes can affect an animal’s way of living because they have to adapt to the new conditions that appear suddenly.
One of these examples is the changing of the marine iguana’s genetic traits due to speciation from other distantly related marine iguanas.
Marine iguanas, native to the Galapagos Islands, have minor genetic differences between populations in the islands. For example, two resident populations in San Cristobal island behave differently with one another, even though they’re on the same island. This highlights the problem, in which environmental problems such as climate change or predation from non-native species risk changing the level of pressure on marine iguanas, forcing them to change their gene pool to adapt, while the species(s) who can’t adapt risk becoming extinct or decreased by population, decreasing the population of the whole marine iguana species.
Evolution is the process by which a species changes their traits over time which can result in a more diversified and varied type of species. This usually happens when a common ancestor of a species splits up and diversifies its trait and behaviour. Evolution can happen due to multiple causes, such as natural selection, which is when only favorable traits get passed down, genetic mutation which is when genes in the species’ population get changed, or adaptation which is when a species adapts to the current environment of their ecosystem.
Natural selection is a process in which only favorable traits of a species are passed on and are able to survive to the next generation due to changes in their environment or ecosystem. This leads to the traits being more common in the future, as the species that are better adapted to the environment can survive and reproduce more than species that don’t, while also passing down their favorable traits to their kids, making it more common in the genepool.
Selective pressure is pressure or changes on a species that cause species with less favorable traits to adapt by changing their traits and/or behaviour to better adapt to the environment. Due to this, traits that are better suited to the current species’ environment get passed down, increasing the frequency of the favorable traits, while less favorable ones are decreased due to the process of natural selection.
