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draft evo HW

Submitted by jkswanson on Thu, 11/22/2018 - 19:46

A:

Figure 1 and 2 show the elephant seals production of offspring, female and male respectively.  The female seal( figure one) has a weak sexual selection and for this species it depends more on the male than female.  In figure 2 you can see that only very little males produce a lot and a little produce some and many produce very little to none.  Compared to the voles the male elephant seal has pretty similar data patterns to figures 3 and 4. The male elephant seal clearly has the strongest sexual selection.  Their ability to reproduce is based solely off of size and strength that is put in competition with one another during fights for the area that contains many fertile females. Figures 3 and 4 are similar to figure 2 in that it shows a gap from offspring around 10-15 off spring to around 35-40 offspring.  This is in both the vole figures and shows that not just one gender of the animal has all the strength in sexual selection but it is more base on each gender having better genes or being stronger or something, instead of elephant seals which have just the male fight over the females. In the vole species both genders compete for reproduction.

B:

OSR is defined as the ratio of sexually competing males to sexually competing females.  For elephant seals the OSR will definitely be above one as we discussed only males compete for sexual reproduction in the elephant seal species.  So there are more males than females competing meaning it must be greater than 1. For the vole species the OSR is harder to predict but should be less than one or equal to one.  This is because a relatively similar number of males and females compete for sexual reproduction in the vole species according to the data in figure 3 and 4. If not more females competing for sex in the species but it looks pretty close so it should be 1 or a little less than 1.

 

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