Natural Selection and Evolution of Animal
-Investigate the role of natural selection in the change of your animal over time. I described many environmental changes in step 2 that had effects on flamingos on Arda. These are ones that could happen in real life. In this step I will focus on a few. During the amount of time depicted in step 2 flamingos went through many changes and adaptations. (1)These include thicker feathers when the temperature of Arda dropped and when the sea levels rose (2)flamingoes waded into deeper water to escape predators and feed. The artic bird depicted in image 15 shows thicker feathers. Flamingos adapted to have feathers that thick when the temperatures had major drops so that they could stay warm and maintain a healthy body heat. The flamingo in image 16 shows how the birds would have waded into deeper waters in comparison to image 17 where they are in shallow waters. These birds can also do this because they are adapted to have much longer legs than most other birds. (3) Since flamingos feed on organisms that live in water they have adapted to "hold their breath while feeding underwater" according to seaworld.com. (4) Another adaptation that flamingos have developed directly because of their environments is the ability to excrete the salt that they take in from the water that they drink because they live in and near bodies of water with high salt content. An image that further demonstrates this is on the step 1 page of this site and is image 10. When these birds moved to these areas that had such conditions the ones that developed these features and behaviors strived and reproduced which caused the whole species to develop these characteristics. Image 18 shows directional selection which flamingos demonstrated when nasal systems that could get rid of extra salt were favored. |
Timelines, Evolutionary Trees, General Evolutionary Information
The evolutionary trees in images 19 and 20 came from /rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/2/275 and www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCprop644.htm. They explain how flamingos came from birds in general and how flamingos split up into subspecies. According to museum.lsu.edu the split up happened because "[scientist] found a deep separation between the deep-keeled and shallow keeled-flamingos, supporting the division of the family into at least two genera. Although outside of our region of interest,[scientists] decided to merge the Lesser Flamingo (P. minor) into Phoenicoparrus rather than retaining three genera in the family."
Summaries
Part 1
Flamingos split from the same group of ducks. Then there was a differentiation in beaks. After that location caused changes is size. This is shown in the above image.
Part 2
Deep-keeled vs. shallow-keeled beaks are what supposedly caused the first split among flamingos which is shown in image 20.
Part 3
Whether flamingo lice affected certain bird or not also affected which ones survived and which ones did not. More info is in http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/zoology/pdf_hi/SCTZ-0316.pdf.
Part 4
With in one of the two groups the flamingos also adapted to be smaller because of where they lived. This is also shown in the above image.
Flamingos split from the same group of ducks. Then there was a differentiation in beaks. After that location caused changes is size. This is shown in the above image.
Part 2
Deep-keeled vs. shallow-keeled beaks are what supposedly caused the first split among flamingos which is shown in image 20.
Part 3
Whether flamingo lice affected certain bird or not also affected which ones survived and which ones did not. More info is in http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/zoology/pdf_hi/SCTZ-0316.pdf.
Part 4
With in one of the two groups the flamingos also adapted to be smaller because of where they lived. This is also shown in the above image.