The experimental barrels, coated in hides of black, gray, brown, white, or black-and-white stripes, basking in the afternoon sun. Strange as it may seem, biophysicist Gábor Horváth and his colleagues had placed the barrels not for the sake of eccentric art, but to settle an age-old evolutionary debate: why do zebras have stripes? From far away, they almost resembled the torsos of lazily grazing animals-only, when flies flicked thirstily onto their sides, no tail swatted them away. Each barrel was outfitted with a different skin: white, black, brown, gray or black-and-white stripes. The next step for researchers is to find out how much inbreeding is caused by humans and how much is being caused by other factors.Last summer, a series of rather unusual water-filled canisters were left to bake in the northern Hungarian sun. Less genetic diversity is concerning because it can make animals more prone to disease and illness. So, although the abnormal stripes themselves aren't harmful or bad, the thing causing them (i.e., inbreeding) is, as it can lead to less genetic diversity of a species. And so, over time, the population can become more and more related to each other.” “There's no exchange of genes between reserves. Platypuses just got weirder: Turns out, they glow in the dark.“Plains zebras are very widespread, but they're often in very tiny little reserves that are fenced, and they don't go out,” she said. Brenda Larison says she is concerned about the impacts of human activity on zebra populations. Zebras with normal stripe patterns roam free in Pilanesberg National Park near Sun City, South Africa. Researchers say the inbreeding is due to small population sizes in nature reserves, which are further secluded due to surrounding groups of humans. They say that this inbreeding is lowering genetic diversity and making it more likely that a zebra will express the recessive trait for abnormal stripes. However, researchers say inbreeding is becoming more common among zebras.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |