Genetic Variety

Neal Vinaixa Period 7
3-17-10 Project Blog

Genetic Variety

Gentic variety is difference in the orgin of genes in an organism through sexual reproduction or a mutation. For an example with sexual reproduction; say my reebop has genes from the orange family, a good match for a geneticly diverse child would be somebody who is from the yellow or green family. This is true because then the offspring will be diverse with both green and orange genes. With a mutation, an organism that is reproducing makes a "mistake" while going through mitosis and the genes may change in the process. The reason genetic variety happens more in organisms that reproduce sexually is because your getting one gene from your mom and one from your dad causing a wider possibility for different genes to be given. Wheras in a mutation with an asexually reproducing organism, the organism which is created through mitosis or binary fision, will be geneticlly identical due to mitosis with mutations being very rare.

With reebobs genetic diversity is easy to see with all of the genes coming from coler-coded families. As I said in the beggining of the project we mated two bugs from different families(orange and green) to create geneticlly diverse offspring both green and orange. As the project continued i paired my bug with someone who did'nt have the same colors(families) as i did, meaning that i had a bug with green and orange genes and they had a bug with pink and white genes. This combination would create an even more geneticlly diverse offspring which would be orange,green,pink and white.But after everybody created their 2nd child some problems arose with genetic variety. Everybody had at least one of the same colors as me and everybody else or the same gender. This means we would have to mate with someone in our own family which would go against the ideas of having a geneticlly diverse mate. This may create some problems if done too much and i will explain why.

Genetic diversity is needed for your family to survive for many reasons. First of all, say your my family, the orange family has a gene that says we don't have stingers but have brown eyes. Whereas the green family is purebred for stingers but have bright red eyes that attract predators. This would be a great match because any offspring might inheiret both a stinger and brown eyes to keep themselves safe from predators. An example of bad things resulting from not diversifying genes would be the Egyptians who had little knowledge of the need for genetic variation. The Egyptian pharohs believing that they needed to keep their bloodlines pure because they thought they were "gods" would mate with their sisters often causing genetic problems like susceptibility to certain disease and birth defects like down syndrome in the offspring. As you can see the ideas of genetic variety are very important to the survival of our species(reebops) and will need to be continued to keep the reebops alive.

Genetic Variety shows how those with the best genes survive.

A geneticly diverse bug.