Are Crickets A Single Species, Or A Species Complex?

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1. A researcher is exploring a tropical rainforest that is destined to be clear cut and turned into a palm oil plantation, six months in the future. She encounters many species that are new to science. a) Which species concept would be most expedient and effective, in the process of collecting, naming, and describing what she finds? Morphological species concept. Most taxonomists use this to classify specimens and describe species. b) Go online and research. Give at least three examples of actual species that are new to science, that were discovered in tropical rainforests, within the last few years. Why don’t northern temperate forests yield as many new species, nowadays? Species that were discovered in …show more content…

Is there an isolation mechanism? Explain? Species complex. A species complex is observed because the crickets are very closely related in species and are similar in appearance, and the differences between them are unclear. Even when male crickets from another location as a female try to mimic playing cals, the female cricket will mate with the male cricket and they will produce fertile offspring. There is an isolation mechanism because it is observed that females will not mate with males that have a call not typical of the location they were collected from. This type of isolation mechanism being observed here is called as behavioral isolation. b) Go online and research. Give at least two examples of species complexes composed of morphologically similar microspecies or cryptic species. The Two-barred Flasher butterfly (Astraptes fulgerator) is an example of a well known cryptic species. Though adult butterflies of this type are identical in appearance, an analysis in DNA barcoding has revealed to scientists to conclude that there are at least three different types of species of this butterfly ("Cryptic Speciation” 1). Another example of cryptic species include mosquitos in the Anopheles barbirostris subgroup. They include six different mosquito species that appear nearly identical in adult morphology. However, they have different roles in spreading malaria and filariasis in Southeast Asia ("A Molecular …show more content…

A common syndrome amongst the Amish is a form of dwarfism called Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, where people may experience being very short, polydactyly, abnormal nails and teeth, and sometimes a hole between the upper chambers of the heart. These unusual phenotypes were brought to Amish communities because of the founder effect. The founder effect is a genetic drift that occurs when a few individuals, who represent a fraction of the of the original gene pool, invade a new area. This particular syndrome was linked to Samuel King and his wife, who came to the area in 1744, and spread their mutated genes amongst members of the Amish community ("Genetic Drift and the Founder Effect"

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