Braden Wall

1. How many seeds were in your initial pepper? This represents the first generation.
There were 143 seeds in my red pepper.
2. How many plants were alive in your pepper population after only 5 generations?
59,797,108,943 peppers
3. Describe your graph. PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR GRAPH!

You can see that the graph starts out to where it doesnt look like it is going up at all, and
then it hits generation 4 and just sky rockets. The blue dotted line is a trend line that shows the
direction in where its heading just to reinforce the point that it is going up and at a quick pace.

Braden

143

Red pepper

20449

2924207

418161601

59797108943

Braden Wall

4. Make a list of four or five environmental factors that might limit natural or wild populations
(not necessarily pepper plant or human populations).
Loss of habitat
Pollution
Reduction in food source
Inbreeding (not enough gene flow)

5. If a population were subjected to some of these environmental factors for a considerable

length of time, would you expect to see any changes in the population? Based on the
information provided above, explain your answer.
Yes I absolutely would

If a population is losing their habitat there is not much they can do, they can adapt leave or die.
Most will likely if they do adapt it will take a lot of time before they will start to have the
population they once did. If they try to leave, sometimes there is only so far they can go. Like the
lamer in Madagascar, they dont really have anywhere to go because that island is their home, its
an island. Once they reach the end that is it.
If they are exposed to pollution, first of all it depends on what kind. Like the peppered moth
situation where there was so much coal being burned that the moths that were a light color stuck
out more to predators. Or things like nuclear radiation and what it is doing to flowers, and fish,
and things that are being exposed to it. If it goes on for too long then it will change them from
what they once were.
Reduction in food source is something they talked about in the grizzly bear article. They
mentioned certain types of trees, and even types of plants they eat can cause problems if they
start disappearing. This is the one I start to get concerned about talking about human population.
If were going up 2 billion people in the last 10 years that is way too much growth and we will
kill ourselves before we even knew what happened.
Inbreeding will cause the problem of not enough gene flow. This can start to show up the bad
chromosomes as we talked about in class, you may have something but it will be masked or
wont be the dominant one. However if inbreeding takes place all of those things could start to
show up and cause a lot of problems.