what do you think will happen if a certain population of an organism stops reproducing? How will it affect balance in nature
Answers
Natural selection is the process by which individuals with characteristics that are advantageous for reproduction in a specific environment leave more offspring in the next generation, thereby increasing the proportion of their genes in the population gene pool over time. Natural selection is the principal mechanism of evolutionary change, and is the most important idea in all biology. Natural selection, the unifying concept of life, was first proposed by Charles Darwin, and represents his single greatest contribution to science.
Natural selection occurs in any reproducing population faced with a changing or variable environment. The environment includes not only physical factors such as climate or terrain, but also living factors such as predators, prey, and other members of a population.
Mechanism of Natural Selection
The mechanism of natural selection depends on several phenomena:
• Heredity: Offspring inherit their traits from their parents, in the form of genes.
• Heritable individual variation: Members of a population have slight differences among them, whether in height, eyesight acuity, beak shape, rate of egg production, or other traits that may affect survival and reproduction. If a trait has a genetic basis, it can be passed on to offspring.
• Overproduction of offspring: In any given generation, populations tend to create more progeny than can survive to reproductive age.
• Competition for resources: Because of excess population, individuals must compete for food, nesting sites, mates, or other resources that affect their ability to successfully reproduce.
Explanation:
Living things are able to reproduce themselves. If organisms fail to do this, populations will diminish and disappear as their members die from old age, disease, accidents, predation, etc. It is a fundamental law of biology that living things can only be produced by other living things; every living organism owes its existence to the reproductive activities of other organisms.
This is contrary to the misconceived ideas of spontaneous generation which some people held in the past. The notion that cockroaches were formed out of crumbs on the bakery floor, that mould was formed out of decaying bread and that rotting sacks of grain turned into mice are examples of how spontaneous generation was thought to operate. Today, these ideas are discredited but they still often provide the stimulus for works of dramatic fiction!
There are two fundamental types of reproduction: