How are pocket mouse an example of natural selection?

The rock pocket mouse is a living example of Darwin’s process of natural selection. In a complete story, from ecosystem to molecules, pocket mice show us how random changes in the genome can take many paths to the same adaptation—a colored coat that hides them from predators.

What type of selection is the rock pocket mouse?

Natural Selection
Several questions are embedded within the short film The Making of the Fittest: Natural Selection and Adaptation, which uses the rock pocket mouse as a living example of natural selection.

What does this rock pocket mice investigation show about evolution?

The illustrations and short film show that there is natural variation of coat color in the population of rock pocket mice living on the lava flow. The short film explains that mutations can cause a change in coat color, and that these genetic changes are being passed on to offspring.

What environment is best suited for the rock pocket mouse?

The Rock Pocket Mouse lives in a desert ecosystem: The Valley of Fire in New Mexico, United States.

How do the pocket mice vary?

Mice living on light-colored sand tend to have light-colored coats, while mice living on patches of dark-colored rock have mostly dark-colored coats. Michael Nachman studies the evolutionary processes that led to these marked differences in rock pocket mouse populations.

What does the rock pocket mouse tell us about how natural selection works?

Subsequent studies demonstrated that there is strong selective pressure maintaining Mc1r allele and coat colour frequencies across the short geographic distances between the light- and dark-coloured rock islands. Thus melanism in rock pocket mice is considered a fabulous example of adaptation by natural selection.

What needs to happen for natural selection to occur?

Four conditions are needed for natural selection to occur: reproduction, heredity, variation in fitness or organisms, variation in individual characters among members of the population. If they are met, natural selection automatically results.

Why do pocket mice have white bellies?

The mice’s underbellies are white because there’s so selective pressure for it to be dark; the predators come from above. The differences in mouse fur color are driven by natural selection. Why do the pocket mice in the dark lava environment have white underbellies? is a random change to an organism’s DNA sequence.