Scientists went out and sampled individuals from the populations. Population siz

Question

Scientists went out and sampled individuals from the populations. Population size can be very difficult to estimate, so scientists often assume all populations are approximately the same size (as we are doing here). When they directly sampled one of the populations, they found that there are approximately 30 breeding females and 20 breeding males (males have a higher mortality rate than females) in the populations (remember that we are assuming that all populations exhibit the same patterns). Also the scientists were able to use capture/recapture methods to determine that the proportion of migrants (migration rate: m) in any given population per generation is 0.01. Scientists assume that migration is equal among all the populations (this might be somewhat unrealistic since migration might be more difficult among populations that are separated a longer distance, but for the purposes of this assignment we will assume all migration is equal). When they actively looked at the difference in survival among the different phenotypes they found that survival of the agouti phenotype was approximately 63%. The survival of the black-backed phenotype was approximately 62.8% and survival of the melanistic phenotype was approximately 62.6%.

How genetically differentiated are the populations? (For reference of comparison, a value of 0.3 or larger would be considered very differentiated, a value close to 0 would be not differentiated). (3 points)

Explanation / Answer

According to the information, the population contains three phenotypes, agouti, black-backed and melanistic. These phenotypes have almost similar survival rates with a difference of 0.4-0.2 units, which is non-significant in nature. The only violation of equilibrium in this population is the migration, which in turn is equal for all the population.

Thus, these set of informations comprehensively demonstrate that this population is somehow following equilibrium and thus the rate of survival are almost similar for all the phenotypes. Further, the fact that all the three phenotypes have almost similar survival rates also strongly suggests that these population have very less genetic differences among each other, thus providing almost equal fitness to all phenotypes. Thus, the value of genetic diffrences must be very close to zero.

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