Natural Selection: Beetles on a Bush

Also called

natural selection · beetles on a bush · red and green beetles · crows eat beetles · survival advantage · variation · genetic drift · evolution · Darwin · inherited trait · population shift · blue beetles · elephant tramples the bushes · selection pressure · प्राकृतिक चयन · विकास · आनुवंशिक विचलन

Topics

• Variation: in one population of green beetles, a few are born red or blue because of changes in their genes.
• Crows can see red beetles on green leaves easily, so they eat more red ones and more green beetles survive.
• The survivors breed and pass their colour on, so over generations the population becomes mostly green.
• Natural selection: a trait that helps survival in that environment becomes common because it is inherited.
• If the bush turns red-brown, the green beetles are now the easy prey and the selection reverses.
• Genetic drift: when elephants trample the bushes, which beetles survive is a matter of chance, not advantage.
• If the chance survivors happen to be blue, the next population is blue even though blue gave no benefit.
• Evolution is a change in the proportions of inherited traits in a population over generations.

About this model

A GLB file of about 437 KB, shown in Lably's 3D viewer and, on a phone, placed in your room with AR. Credit: Model, science and animation: Lably (built procedurally with three.js; no downloaded meshes). | CC BY 4.0. Original geometry and animation made for Lably.

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