Question

A population of squirrels has an average tail length of 20 cm. You gather the 200 individuals with the longest tails you can find. Their average is 25cm. This long-tailed group breeds and produces 310 offspring. When full-grown, this new group average tail length is 21cm. (a) What is the narrow-sense heritability in squirrel tail length? (b) If you were to graph tail length of offspring against midparent, what would you expect it to look like?

Answer 1

Mean tail length of the long tailed group of selected parents, Ts= 25cm; mean tail length of the original population, T'= 20cm whereas the mean tail length of the offspring produced, T0= 21cm.

Therefore, Selection differential, and Selection response,

(a) Narrow sense heriatbility,

(b) The graph of offfspring tail length against midparent is as follows: