Jump to content

Spawn's dad

Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    3,434

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Spawn's dad

    put your razor where your Bush is!

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

    Thank you for visiting the Ballpark web site. We appreciate your interest

    in our products and are happy to

    assist you with your questions and/or concerns.

     

    Sara Lee and Ball Park created a fictitious character that does not

    understand the vegetarian lifestyle. His

    lack of understanding does not extend through our company. Frank expresses

    that being a vegetarian may

    be un-American in the context that eating meat is a commonly accepted

    practice in the American society

    and among his friends.

     

    Please refer to the USDA website for more information about eating a

    balanced diet.

     

    Sincerely,

     

    Erin Horton

    Consumer Response Department

    put your razor where your Bush is!

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

    and the birds' beaks are getting smaller!

     

     

     

    capt.2593eeea59d94161a042857e3a534b6d.darwin_evolution_nyol918.jpg?x=380&y=253&sig=eOPN3e96EJLXYQH_JmeWJg--

     

     

    A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source.

     

    The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

     

    Grant has been studying Darwin's finches for decades and previously recorded changes responding to a drought that altered what foods were available.

     

    It's rare for scientists to be able to document changes in the appearance of an animal in response to competition. More often it is seen when something moves into a new habitat or the climate changes and it has to find new food or resources, explained Robert C. Fleischer, a geneticist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and National Zoo. This was certainly a documented case of microevolution, added Fleischer, who was not part of Grant's research.

     

    Grant studied the finches on the Galapagos island Daphne, where the medium ground finch, Geospiza fortis, faced no competition for food, eating both small and large seeds.

     

    In 1982 a breeding population of large ground finches, Geospiza magnirostris, arrived on the island and began competing for the large seeds of the Tribulus plants. G. magnirostris was able to break open and eat these seeds three times faster than G. fortis, depleting the supply of these seeds.

     

    In 2003 and 2004 little rain fell, further reducing the food supply. The result was high mortality among G. fortis with larger beaks, leaving a breeding population of small-beaked G. fortis that could eat the seeds from smaller plants and didn't have to compete with the larger G. magnirostris for large seeds.

     

    That's a form of evolution known as character displacement, where natural selection produces an evolutionary change in the next generation, Grant explained in a recorded statement made available by Science.

×
×
  • Create New...