Toothpick Fish Lab

To determine the generations of fish, colored toothpicks were used as alleles and were picked out randomly. There was collected data recording the series of fish alleles picked out. When the yellow fish became extinct because the fish pool was very lush and verdant with seaweed and algae, the population of fish decreased. But not all of the yellow alleles were gone, the yellow alleles could blend in with red alleles to make orange scaled fish. This is called codominance, the blending of two alleles. Since there are still yellow alleles left, it is possible for two fish to have yellow offspring. In the first three generations, the green allele was the most common because it was dominant over the rest of the recessive alleles, which blocks the red and yellow alleles. But when the green fish loses its ability to camouflage after having factory waste dumped into the fish pools, it is eaten and the whole population of green fish is wiped out! The population decreased tremendously, but the yellow fish will probably start increasing again because yellow alleles still exist and there are no more dominant green alleles to block the recessive yellow allele.
If the green fish wiped out first before the yellow fish went extinct, the population of the fish will decrease dramatically fast because most of the fish were green. Also, the green allele is dominant over the rest of the alleles. If the yellow fish didn't lose their ability to camouflage, there will probably be more orange fish in the next generation because there is the same amount of yellow alleles as the red ones, which can be combined in codominance and have orange offspring. If the orange fish went into the "morgue", there will be a loss of red and yellow alleles. If the red fish went extinct, many red alleles would be lost because it is a recessive allele which needs two red alleles to make a red fish. Red fish is able to be part of green fish offspring because green fish could have red alleles. Genetics and ecology come together because you could figure out the probability of some animals and extinction using genetics. I believe ecologists needed to know how to solve a mono-hybrid punnet square in order to study organisms and how they became extinct and if the population will ever increase!