Question

Suppose that you are starting a long-term study of a population of annual, flowering plants isolated on a small island. Reading some recent papers has convinced you that a new and highly prevalent bee pollinator on the island will probably cause an evolutionary shift towards larger flower size. Outline the observations and experiments you would need to do in order to document whether natural selection occurs in your study population over the course of your research. What traits would you measure, and why?

Answer 1

In order to decide whether the flower size is increasing because of bee pollinator, i would like to frame my experiment the following way..

1. select a set of flowering plants of same age group i.e size , width of the stem should be same, should've started flowering or buds seen and healthy plants.

Such plants are grown in a green house condition with similar ecological conditions.

* one set of area of flowers can be grown without bee polinator.

* one areaof flowers can be grown with few number of bee pollinators the size can be determined.

* another set of flowers with large number of bees can be observed.

depending o this criteria , if at all there is a natural selection of bees inducing flower size over the year it can be marked.