Moth

are peppered moths and rock pocket mice. Peppered moths are moths whose population was dominated by white/light colored moths with brown/black speckles, making them look “peppered”. These moths blended in well with birch trees they rested on before the English Industrial Revolution. When the Revolution came about, air pollution caused birch trees to go dark, causing light colored moths to stick out like sore thumbs. What happened from this was that the minority group of peppered moths, who were…

The Spotted Wing Drosophila fly (SWD) is a quickly spreading across the United States of America. As SWD numbers get larger the number of fruit crops gets smaller. Aijun Zhang, a chemist working with the Agriculture Research Service, Invasive Insect Biocontrol, and the Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville Maryland, has found a solution to the SWD problem, Methyl benzoate. Methyl benzoate is emitted by snapdragons and petunias, to attract bees. SWD, unlike bees, is repelled from Methyl benzoate,…

dimpled spider, fat and white, / On a white heal-all, holding up a moth / Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth.” The setting seems mundane aside from the unusual coincidence that all of the figures are unnaturally white. He considers: “What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night?” The specific concurrence of events…

third person, finds a plump white spider on a flower ready to eat a white moth. The moth is like a rigid satin sheet of cloth, dead, killed by the spider. They are sitting on a white flower, called a heal-all, which is said to have healing powers. The three are surrounded by darkness and wrongdoing. The spider is a murderer, the moth has been…

creating pollution that changed the colors of the bark on birch trees from white to gray, the color of the moths become a large factor in survival. The moths who were gray could blend in with the new color, hiding from predators. The white moths had a harder time. This caused there to be a higher concentration of gray moths to survive and, therefore, reproduce. With the higher frequency of grey moths reproducing with this allele, the species would evolve to maintain this allele for better…

the yucca moth pollinates neighboring Joshua trees while laying its eggs inside the flower. Without this moth the Joshua tree could not reproduce, nor could the moth, whose larvae needs the seeds as nutrient. This connection between the Joshua tree and yucca moth is a clear example of a symbiotic relationship. This crucial exchange could be in jeopardy with the impending climate change. Climate change will affect the timing of the seasons, which could disrupt the mating pattern of the moth. This…

greenish-yellow caterpillar with a red stripe on its back and a broad blue edging on each side of the stripe. Also, it has a blue band with red patches on each side of the caterpillar. This caterpillar grows to a size of 30mm, and when it turns into a moth, its wingspan is 3cm. Additionally, if someone were to cut this caterpillar in half, it would be the same on each side, so it has a bilateral symmetry. Habitat The Wattle Cup caterpillar lives in open woodland like a forest. It lives in…

zooplankton cultures used in experimentation. Works and Presentations Kristine Grayson, Dylan Parry, Derek Johnson, Nora Krajah, Dominique Grim (November 2013). Local adaptation in larval performance across the latitudinal range of the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar, in North America, Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting, Austin Texas. (Poster) Hasan Alkhairo, Dominique Grim (May 2013). Characterization of gene families and genome features from VCU’s collection of…

to achieve evolutionary change can be found. One of the best examples of this is the well studied peppered moth, Biston betularia, that through rapid evolutionary change brought about by natural selection from a mutation in a changing environment, it increased its fitness value through camouflage (Cook, L & Saccheri, I 2013). Elaborating more on this, before the Industrial Revolution the moths with the highest fitness value were typically whitish in colour,…

affects the frequency or change of alleles in a population. It is asked, “How does migration affect heterozygosity in a population?” I predicted that migration increases heterozygosity in isolated populations. To explore and test out this hypothesis the moth program in the “PopGenLab” was used to carry out the experiment. What was found that migration did keep population high and kept heterozygosity at a somewhat constant level; whereas when there is no migration there is more heterozygosity.…