Asked by Ashlyn😘

Mosquitoes can carry and transmit many diseases to humans. The insecticide DDT was heavily used to reduce mosquito populations. However, mosquito populations developed a resistance to DDT. This made DDT less effective.
In 3–5 sentences, describe how mosquitoes may have develop this resistance to DDT. Make sure to define natural selection in your answer and how it relates to this situation.

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
Natural selection is the process by which individuals with heritable traits that increase their chances of surviving and reproducing become more common in a population over generations. Mosquito populations already had genetic variation, and rare mutations that detoxify DDT or change its target (so the insecticide is less effective) allowed some mosquitoes to survive spraying. Those survivors reproduced and passed the resistance genes to their offspring, so the frequency of resistant alleles rose and DDT became less effective at killing the mosquitoes.