For this project, we had to come up with an animal that is endangered and may soon be extinct. My group and I decided on Giant Pandas. We studied how Giant Pandas live, how many are left, the kind of habitat they live in, their ancestral history, why they are an endangered species. With the information we took notes on and answering a few questions about biodiversity and evolution, we created a slideshow to present to our class shown below.
content
evolution- Evolution is where living organisms evolve and change over time to adapt to a different environment. Giant Pandas have evolved over time to fit new environments. They are much larger than their common ancestor.
biodiversity- Biodiversity is the variety of life in different habitats and environments.
reproduction- Reproduction is the production of offspring by a sexual process. One of the reasons Giant Pandas are endangered is because they have a slow reproduction rate.
natural selection- Natural selection is the process where organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.
artificial selection- Artificial selection is the intentional reproduction of organisms in a population that have desirable traits.
speciation- Speciation is the formation of new and different species during evolution.
types of speciation- The four types of speciation are allopatric, peripatric, sympactric, and artificial. Allopatric speciation occurs when a species separate into two different groups which are isolated from one another. Peripatric speciation occurs when small groups of individuals break off from the larger group and create a new species. When there are no physical barriers preventing any members of a species from mating from mating with another, and all members are in close proximity to one another, this is called sympatric speciation. Artificial speciation is the creation of new species by people.
survival of the fittest- "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory. It is a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection.
isolation- Isolation is the lack of interbreeding, or little genetic mixing between organisms of the same species.
extinction- Extinction is the termination of an organism or of a group of organisms in a species.
gene pool- Gene pool is the stock of different genes in an interbreeding population.
mutation- Mutation is the action or process of genes changing and varying.
gene flow- Gene flow is the transfer of genetic variation from one population to another.
shrinking population- A population decline(shrinking population) in humans or other species is any great reduction in a population caused by certain events such as isolation, disease, or other catastrophes.
non-random mating- Nonrandom mating occurs when the probability that two individuals in a population will mate is not the same for all possible pairs of individuals.
adaptation- Adaptation is the change or the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment over a period of time.