Natural selection...?

Question

I need to find an animal to do a natural selection project on, one with lots of information about it . No common animals like penguins, lions, giraffes, and finches........

Answer 1

Panda. There is a great book of natural science essays by Dr Stephen Jay Gould called, "The Panda's Thumb" that you might find interesting.

Answer 2

How about he HUMAN animal?  If not for attny's and the goverment banging for safer cars during accidents {etc}then "Natural Selection" would have kept the stupid people from living and subsequently procreating. If two idiots have children, are they twice as likely to be stupid ?

Answer 3

Can you do something on an animal that is extinct?  I don't know why, but I was thinking of the legendary do-do bird.  Check out this website though: http://library.thinkquest.org/5801/mamma...

There seem to be a lot of neat things there.  Good luck :)

Answer 4

koala bear

Answer 5

No animal to suggest, but you might enjoy Kipling's "How the Leopard Got Its Spots."

Answer 6

your list doest seem like common animals to me, but im assumming domesticated animals are out....how about the classic fruit fly.

Answer 7

orchids that specific wasps pollinate

Answer 8

One word: baboons

They are a rare group of terrestrial primates. Should be MONEY!

Answer 9

Zebras! Evolved to incorporate stripes, got faster, hence the horselike body. Some varieties that live in dense undergrowth have very large ears, to hear preditors moving.

It practically writes itself

Answer 10

Insects, due to their shorter life spans make good subjects for natural selection research.  Moths & fruit flys have lots of natural selection data on them.  The Russians did some experiments on domestication of Artic foxes that produced some very interesting information in less than 30 years.

Strangely, selectively breeding foxes that were friendly to humans also produced other results like spotted or multi colored fur.

Answer 11

You need to get some fruit flies.  They go through several generations in just a few days so you can see the results your external influences have on them and their adaptations.  At least that's the way they do it in college.

Answer 12

Try the peppered moth.  It was a famous example of natural selection that was discredited because of problems in the methods of the original research.

The research has been repeated, avoiding the mistakes in method and is again a good example of natural selection.

The link at the bottom will get you started.  You will have to go to the top of the page to get the article--the comments are interesting too.

wl

Answer 13

Do the cichlid fish of Lake Tanganyika. They have been well studied, represent different aspects of natural selection, such as  splitting of one species into many, evolutionary pressures due to lake drying, sexual selection, food availability etc.

Lake Tanganyika, over the last million years or so, has dried several times, going from one large lake (as now) to many smaller lakes, giving rise to different levels of isolation of many generations.

The link below gives some information.

Good luck.

Answer 14

do dogs i did a stuy similar and it worked out great =)