Week 8: Traits

This week, the driving questions were: Why do organisms have so many similarities, and yet so many differences? How do organisms get their traits?

To investigate this, we we looked at rock pocket mice and why they seemed to change their color. We first looked at a series of pictures below and tried to put them in order of what came first and what came next. After we put the pictures in order, we tried to come up with a reason for why there are more dark colored mice on the bottom pictures vs the top pictures. We then watched a video which explained that the dark color and that there was a complete change in the environment that the mice had to adapt to. The dark colored mice was a random adaptation, but natural selection caused the dark colored mice to have better odds of living, causing them to adapt to there being more dark colored mice. I am still wondering how the recessive gene of dark colored fur was able to be there before the rocks turned dark.