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Is this an example of natural selection? <(^_^<)10 points for the best answer(>^_^)>?
For those of you who have visited palau I am sure you have heard of jelly fish lake. All the jelly fish have lost their powerful stinging cells so they are harmless to most, if not all swimmers.
This might not be an accurate description but feel free to correct me.
Is this an example of natural selection at work?
4 Answers
- SmegheadLv 79 years agoFavorite Answer
Without a clear selective advantage for losing stings, it's hard to say it's due to natural selection. That is, it's not clear why stingless jellyfish would be better off, reproductively, than those with stings. We could speculate, but without data to back it up, that's not really good enough.
Without more evidence, we can't really say whether it's due to natural selection or genetic drift. Drift is a real possibility because there would have been a strong founder effect when the population became isolated. In small populations, neutral mutations can become fixed through random chance. That is, if a "stingless" mutant allele arose or was present in the small founding population, it could have become the only allele in the population just due to dumb luck.
- John RLv 79 years ago
Possibly, but there's not enough information to go on. What benefit to the animal would losing the nematocysts have? Is the possession of the powerful nematocysts genetically determined, and if so, what selective pressure might lead to the loss of these things? Could it be something else - for instance, could the development of nematocysts be dependant upon some factor that is not found in this lake?
- 9 years ago
The isolation of the lake has allowed the jellyfish to develop on their own and become a unique species. They've lost their stingers through natural selection / evolution because they don't have the need for them anymore.