Toothpick Fish

Throughout each generation, there are always changes in population. The toothpick fish lab was completed in order to determine the way this might happen. There are four colors of fish, which are red, yellow, orange, and green. The phenotype of the fish being green could have the genotype being GG, Gr or Gy. Red would need to have rr, yellow would have yy, and orange would have ry. The green allele is G, red is r, and yellow is y. The lab started out with twelve fish and with all the alleles in the gene pool. There are no fish in the morgue yet. In the first generation, the results were six green fish, one red, three yellows, and two being orange. The yellow fish were put into the morgue. The population of yellow fish had now decreased. The second generation consisted of six green fish, three reds, no yellows, and one orange. The reason for there being no yellows could be because of the death of the yellow fish in the last generation. The third generation included six green fish again, one red, and two orange. Again, there were no yellow fish. There were many heterozygous fish and most turned out to be green because of its dominance. In addition, there were a few heterozygous orange fish, but there weren't many. All the reds and yellow were homozygous, because both of those traits are recessive.

The changes in environment could greatly affect the lives of various creatures. In this lab, some of the toothpick fish were killed off because of factory waste that killed the seaweed and algae, which made it harder to camouflage for green fish. The red and orange survived because the green allele doesn't show up in any of them, and all had good camouflage. Only three were left. If this instance were to be altered, for example, if the red and orange were not exposed to good camouflage, the onsequences wouldn't be the same. The green fish may over populate and if the green fish have good camouflage for a long time, the yellow and red alleles would slowly disappear. Or even if just the red fish would vanish, the yellow or orange would end up vanishing at some point as well. Overall, the genes of different living things make a huge difference in their environment.