Question

A scientist is studying a population of frogs in a pond. One day, copious amounts of pesticides are mistakenly released into the pond, killing off the majority of frogs (leaving only a few survivors). When the researcher revisits this pond five years later, he notices that the genetic diversity of this frog population has been dramatically reduced (compared to pre-pesticide levels). This is not an example of which of the following?

a. genetic driftb. nonadaptive evolutionc. the bottleneck effectd. the founder effecte. All of the answer options are correct.

Answer 1

Option E.

Step-by-step explanation:

Genetic drift occurs when random mutation increases in frequency in the gene pool and results in the increase in frequency in the alleles in the population which is not the case in this situation.

Non-adaptive evolution refers to evolution not affected by fitness. In this case, a few frog species survived, indicative of fitness ability of some frog species to survive the pesticide and hence this is an adaptive evolution.

Bottleneck effect and founders' effect are not relevant. The difference between founder events and population bottlenecks is the type of event that causes them. A founder event occurs when a small group of individuals is separated from the rest of the population, whereas a bottleneck effect occurs when most of the population is destroyed. Bottleneck effect might be prevalent here but I am not too sure either.