BIO-8 Lecture Notes - Lecture 32: Growing Season, Phenotypic Plasticity, Convergent Evolution
Document Summary
Environmental variation favors the evolution of variable phenotypes. Temporal environmental variation - describes how environmental conditions change over time. Some temporal variation is predictable, including alternation of day and night and seasonal changes in temperature and precipitation. Weather - refers to the variation in temperature and precipitation over periods of hours or days. Climate - refers to the typical atmospheric conditions that occur throughout the year, measured over many years. Events can be rare, but have large effects (ex. tsunamis) Some variation occurs in regular intervals (ex. Spatial variation - large scale spatial variation may be caused by climate , land, topography, and soil type; small scale variation by plant structure and animal behavior. A particular scale of spatial variation may be important to one organism but not to another. Variable environments favor evolution of variable phenotypes - result from genes interacting with the environment. Phenotypic trade-off - neither phenotype does well in both environments.
