The Power of Natural Selection!

With both my Entomology course, and the Biology 101 labs I am teaching, Natural selection has been stuck in my mind for the past week or so.

After teaching natural selection to students, who may have never studied evolution before, it made me realize how complicated it can seem to someone who never thought about it!

I found this cute graphic (that of course includes an insect) to help explain it...

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0_0/bergstrom_02

This mechanism can apply to many different situations! The important thing to note, is that the green beetle can't pass the "green gene" on to future populations because it is eaten by the bird before it has a chance to reproduce. The beetles with the "brown gene" were able to produce more offspring because they lived longer.

This is one of the mechanisms that lead to such an amazing diversity of insects today!!