The exam will be Tuesday, March 24. If you will be absent that day, e-mail me by the end of the day on Wednesday, March 18, so that we can schedule your makeup exam.
You may not use your notes or textbook during the exam. You will not need a calculator.
The exam will consist of about 10 to 15 questions. Some of the questions may be answered with one or two sentences, while other questions may require longer, essay-type answers (and would therefore be worth more). I haven't yet decided on the balance of short and long-answer questions to use.
Here is a list of basic concepts that I've covered in lecture. The questions will not ask you to recite definitions for these; instead, they will ask you to apply your knowledge and understanding of these concepts to new situations.
Here are a couple of questions to give you an idea of the format:
A population of 20,000 garter snakes lives on an island in Lake Erie. The mother of Sammy the Snake ate a pesticide-laden grasshopper, and the pesticide caused a mutation in the gamete that became Sammy. So Sammy is heterozygous for a brand new allele. What is most likely to happen to that allele over the next generations? Why?
Drosophila sechellia is a species of fruit fly that lives only in the Seychelles Islands, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, where it lays its eggs only in the fruit of the Morinda citrifolia tree. D. simulans is closely related to D. sechellia, but it is found all over the world, living on a wide variety of fruit. Which species would you expect to have a higher level of codon bias? Why?
You are studying a species of frog that mates on one night of the year. You've found that a simple one-gene, two-allele polymorphism controls croaking volume in males: LL croak very loudly, Ll croak moderately, and ll croak rather softly. You've captured all of the mating pairs and frogs that couldn't find a mate in a pond and have measured the croaking volume of each male. You find that the frequency of the LL genotype is higher in mating frogs than in frogs that aren't mating. The frequency of Ll is about the same in mating and non-mating frogs, while ll is less common in mating frogs than in non-mating frogs. What kind of selection is this? Which genotype has the highest relative fitness, and which has the lowest? If this continued for many more generations, what would you expect to see? If you follow this population for 10 more years, and the allele frequency doesn't do what you expected, what might be causing a result different from what you predicted?
Return to John McDonald's home page
This page was last revised March 6, 2009. Its URL is http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/evolstudyguide.html