BIOLOGY 1M03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Naked Mole-Rat, Null Hypothesis, Fossorial
3 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
Tree of life; molecular data and domains of life. Application of the principle of maximum parsimony: how many times did the nucleus. Hypothesis: giraffes have long necks to allow for access to food resources. Prediction: giraffes should eat food resources that are high in trees. Turns out that giraffes usually don"t extend their necks fully during feeding. An alternative hypothesis (that isn"t really mutually exclusive from the feeding hypothesis) is that giraffes evolved long necks because longer-necked males win more fights than shorter-necked giraffes, and can then father more offspring. Eusocial and fossorial: one female breeds with 1-3 males, and most individuals (male and female) spend their entire lives in the colony working, but not breeding. If the queen dies or is removed from the colony, females may fight to the death to become the new queen. Colonies are highly inbred (although some animals do migrate) but this does not seem to adversely affect them.
