Blog Post Module 3: Reflection Prompt

How do you define fitness? Also, how would you measure fitness in a natural population?

- I would define fitness as being a state in which an organism is best fit or best equipped for their particular environment. This is in terms of their ability to pass on their desirable traits. These desirable traits will be traits that are best fit to ensure survival in a their particular environment. 

- I would say it would be very difficult to measure the fitness of an organism directly. In a natural environment, I think the phenotype of the organism would be the sole way of measuring an organism's fitness. Due to gene variation in a natural environment, it is impossible to look at an organism and know for certain that they have fully dominant or recessive alleles for a specific trait. 

Provide a concrete example; i.e., be specific what organism you have in mind and describe the concrete steps you would take to quantify fitness.

- Just by looking at the picture of a platypus below, we can tell a lot about its fitness just by looking at it's phenotypes. It has sort of a shine that comes off its coat, has webbed paws, and there are no visible deformities (the platypus is probably very polite as well, but that's just an assumption). These are visible signs of health and efficient traits. The shiny coat tells us this is a healthy organism, the webbed paws tells us the platypus can efficiently swim, and a lack of deformities tells us this organism does not phenotypically show obvious signs of an undesirable trait. Just by looking at the organism, we can somewhat gauge it's fitness, but again, this is a very indirect method. 


Comments

  1. Travis17 September 2021 at 18:00

    Shaun, I found your platypus example to be quite humorous. While it seems very simple, and at first potentially too simple, I also feel it gets at some important points. It is very likely that webbed paws are related to fitness because maybe they allow for better movement, maybe the shiny coat can better attract a future mate, and maybe because it has no deformities it can better pass on its traits.
    I think comparing reproductive success of these traits to platypus' with opposing traits could yield a measurement of fitness.
    What would be your ideal to measure reproductive success of your platypus model?

    ReplyDelete

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