Jill is a PhD student who is writing her dissertation on a population of rats. These rats are in the wild. The majority of the population consists of darkly-colored rats. After 5 years of observations, rats with white fur outnumber the dark-colored rats.
In three to five sentences, provide two or more different explanations of why Jill is seeing this change in her wild rat population. Please use vocabulary you learned in this unit.
1 answer
One possible explanation for the change in the rat population could be natural selection. If the area where the rats live has experienced changes such as temperature or vegetation, the white fur may provide an advantage for the rats to thrive in the new environment. Another possible explanation could be genetic drift, which is a random change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time. This could result in an increase in the frequency of the white fur allele due to chance events, rather than natural selection.