Blog 7: Biomes Compare/Contrast

There are many biomes that have their unique features that make up the environments every organism live in. Two of them includes Grasslands and Temperate Forests.

Grasslands:

Characteristics:

• Highly nutritional soil, wide range of plants can be easily grown in this environment.
• Due to rich soil, grasslands are considered ideal spots to convert into farmland.
• Above 100 degrees Fahrenheit during summer, great contrast compared to winter season.
• A large portion, if not the majority, of the plants are grasses. Plants like trees, bushes, and wildflowers are also existent, but their ability to recover from fires is poor, unlike the deeply-rooted grass species.
• Due to the lack of large plants, there is the lack of shelter for small animals against their predators, along with lack of large diversity of species.
• Majority of the animals present are herbivores, namely mammals with hooves.

Temperate Forests:

Characteristics:

• Majority of the plants present are leaf-shedding trees, which do so during the autumn season.
• Due to the large majority of these trees, people find that food, oxygen, and timber are crucial resources this environment provides. 
• It is currently the second-most rainiest biome found, with temperatures reaching around 50 degrees Fahrenheit on average.
• Among the species of plants, the trees have different-colored leaves in each season, in which would fall off annually to make way for new leaves the next year's blooming season.
• Animals residing in this environment adapt along with the trees and the ever-changing weather. Most of them hibernate or migrate to warmer climates when the trees begin losing their leaves and the weather turning cold. 

Blog 6: Most Important Food Pyramid Section

I personally think that the Vegetables section is one of the most important part of the standard food pyramid. The beneficial factors of this group is near-boundless. They are a crucial part of a healthy lifestyle, containing various nutrients that support our ever-active bodies, boosting the strength of our systems. Like fruits, they are hardly served in a greasy, unhealthy fashion and are mostly good for you; this is almost contrary to items in the oils category, which do little to no good in terms of energy-packing and supporting our bodies.

Blog 5: Human-Generated Extinction

There are several factors humans contribute to for a sixth extinction. Probably one of the most heated one (pun intended) is our cause for the world's global warming. The environment has been going for the worse due to our industrializing of many parts of the globe, ousting needed plantation. This leads to the death of many animals that heavily depends on the plants. Due to the lack of very clean ways to dispose factory waste properly, other intact areas have been polluted by trash and would still be destroyed nonetheless.  If nothing is done to improve our ways of doing things. everything would lead to the extinction of many organisms.

Blog 4: Types of Selection

• Directional Selection: This selection is when an uncommon phenotype is chosen over a more common one. It will change the allele frequency by shifting it to another direction, eventually becoming fixed.

• Stabilizing Selection: This selection is when genetic diversity dwindles as population goes stable on a trait value. One of the most common form of natural selection, it mostly leads to negative selection. 

• Disruptive Selection: This selection is when extreme values for a trait is chosen over more plain values. Due to varying traits, it'll eventually lead to two distinct groups of the same organism.

Blog 3: Microevolution

Microevolution is a change in the gene frequency, these different alleles are which would be able to lead to a new subspecies. Sometimes it occurs during natural selection where the organisms that have the most suited characteristics in their environment would tend to give offspring with its alleles inherited. Gene mutation, shuffling, and crossing over are among variations of this change.