Jolyn's Blog for Hotdawgs

In this unit, we talked about sex. Not that type of sex, but reproduction! Recently we done a coin sex lab to simulate the process of meiosis and reproduction. The coins had a dominant and recessive, heterozygous, trait or the same allele, homozygous, on the front and back of the coin. Then you and your partner would flip it and see what "your child" would have, whether it was to determine if it was a boy or girl, or if it had bipolar disorder. In the dihybrid cross simulation, there were varieties of traits. It had 16 different genotypes, unlike the monohybrid, where there were 4 genotypes. The limit of using probability to predict our offsring's traits was was limited. It could help you find the average for the traits, but the probability will not be correct all the time. I was just a way to compare to the punnett squares that we had developed. By understanding this concept, I understand the concept of genes and recombination. In life, I will potentially have a child th...

Enjoy my infographic of genetics!

We were given a fictional debate about the different types of reproduction. The author, Olivia Judson, presents herself as a TV talk show host, interviewing an asexual, single cell, a bdelloid rotifer. She argues that asexual is the better way to live. Asexual species reproduce by cloning/ bacteria fission, budding, regeneration, and vegetation propagation. Benefits of asexual reproduction are the short amount of time it takes, how easy it is, can be a single parent, and can produce lots of offspring. "All else being equal, an asexual female who appears in a population should have twice as many offspring as her sexual counterparts" (Judson 215). Sexual reproduction, on the other hand, use broadcast spawning, paired spawning, spores, seeds, and (most commonly) copulation. This way, it creates genetic variation, allows survival rate to increase, and ensures the "best" pass in their genes. It requires lots of energy and time, exposes parasites/STDs, creates ad genetic ...