Question

Imagine you are trying to test whether a population of flowers is undergoing evolution. You suspect there is selection pressure on the color of the flower: bees seem to cluster around the red flowers more often than the blue flowers. In a separate experiment, you discover blue flower color is dominant to red flower color. In a field, you count 600 blue flowers and 200 red flowers. How many of the blue flowers are heterozygous?

Answer 1

For you to answer to this question you need to think at the alleles, so let's say the dominant one is A, and the other one is a.

Step-by-step explanation:

With that said, we need to take a look at a proportion below:

Let's imagine the possibility of both flowers being Aa, so we have Aa x Aa right? Okay, now let's do the math

AA Aa Aa aa

Now it's time for us to check the information to see if it matches with the question, we have 600 blue to 200 red flowers, that means 3/1 because: 600/200 = 3/1. So for each red we'll have 3 blue flowers. So this is correct, but we still need the answer, how many of them are heterozygous, well, if this is the right path to follow, it'll be like this:

AA Aa Aa (not counting the aa because they're red)

These are the blue ones, but we need the heterozygous right? so the relationship will be like: for each AA we'll have 2 Aa, doing the math the answer will be 400.