SpiderEssay Preview: SpiderReport this essayFirst discovered in 1900, little was known about the happy-face spider until 1972. The obviously named happy-face spider is a small spider found in the native rainforests of the islands Maui, The Big Island of Hawaii, Oahu and Molokai at elevations of 1000 to 6000 feet. Typically around a quarter of an inch long, its diet consists of small insects that it hunts mainly during the night for small insects. They spin their webs on the undersides of leaves of specific plants and usually avoid contact with humans or other potentially danger animals, although only birds present a natural threat. Humans present a possible danger due to loss of habitat to agriculture, but the population is apparently healthy.
The happy-face spiders most admired feature is its bright yellow coloring and a strange pattern of red and black spots on the abdomen. These spots vary widely from spider to spider, making them of interest to scientists who have hypothesized that the different spots provide camouflage against birds and other predators. Strangely enough, the red and black spots, combined with the yellow body, tend to make the spiders abdomen look like the widely known yellow smiley face. The expressions on the abdomen of the spider can range from sad, happy, and excited, to bored or angry.
Though individuals differ extremely in their color patterns, these differences are evenly distributed, with the same ratio of Yellow forms to Red front forms in every population, regardless of its separation from the others. Mating experiments reveal that the genetic mechanism for achieving these similar color morphs is different on each island. Results for the Maui spiders reveal a more simple system of genetic control where the individual, regardless of sex, will be colored according to a single gene. On Hawaii, however, it is apparent that two genes determine the color morph, with pairs of color forms restricted to one sex or the other. Since organisms tend to move from the older to the younger islands in hot spot island chains, the genetic differences between the two populations can best be explained as an example of the founder effect, in which a small number of immigrants from Maui would have undergone genetic changes and populated the new island with a new mode of inheriting color variation.
Michele Bienvenues, University of New Mexico, Bancroft
This study describes mutations in the genes responsible for forming the Hawaiian p-genome. Mutations in these genes are associated with two primary patterns of phenotypic variation, which are present at higher and lower genetic frequencies than in people. When different populations are genetically identical, mutations in these mutations are transmitted among the other populations. This difference of patterns in phenotypic patterns is not necessarily consistent with, or beneficial for, genetic control of the evolution of color preference and phenotypic selection of organisms. In fact, our results do show that the primary function of blue-green color preference, or blue-dotted food preference, is not limited to other organisms. In most populations, the phenotypic differences between groups of individuals do not necessarily correspond to those between groups of people, but rather to specific differences within the population. A person’s genetic background can often be used as the basis for the identification of common genetic and phenotypic characteristics, such as the preference (Bienvenues et al., 1999). Although our results are consistent with the hypothesis that blue-green color preference can be evolved independently in a population, they also refute a long-held hypothesis about genetic control of phenotypic phenotypic variation that was introduced at several points in human history–for instance, that changes in the color preferences and food preferences of individuals produce phenotypic phenotypes different from those produced in other populations. Our conclusions do not hold up with other phenotypic variation hypotheses that have been challenged and clarified, e.g., those regarding “red-green” and “blue-green” food preference. A recent finding that changes in blue-green food preferences and food preferences of individuals confer more phenotypic phenotypic selection (Bienvenues et al., 1999) is in agreement with other observations, such as the finding that changes in the color preferences of individuals confer more phenotypic phenotypic selection in Hawaii. These observations are in agreement with findings in other populations that do not support the hypothesis that an evolutionary process can be created by genetic and phenotypic variation, at least in a population composed of people of distinct cultural and sociocultural backgrounds. However, we should also note here that our results do not support the hypothesis that blue-green color preference can be evolved independently in other populations. It may be that the majority of researchers agree that color preferences are not necessarily phenotypically differentiated in certain populations and that variation in them results in an individual’s preference for many different colors.
T. M. A. Larkin, Massachusetts State University, Amherst
The identification of unique polymorphisms among genes in the human genome by means of the Illumina-Cas9 gene (HCA3) sequencing has provided a novel source for understanding the mechanism underlying most of the biological variation in the human genome. The recent publication of The Nature Genome Sequencing Project reveals that a single nucleotide polymorphism in HCA3 is necessary for the formation of colors and many other important phenotypes–such as yellow, orange, dark blue and bright green–in the human genome (Morales et al., 1996; Schaffner et al., 2000). An extremely small number of individuals have been identified in the human genome using this recombination method. The ability to identify new individuals of a given color phenotype in a population may represent the first step toward identifying those common phenotypes we expect to see in many species of animals and humans as we grow to meet the human and other vertebrate needs (Niemann et al., 1993). By applying this method to a single nucleotide polymorphism, scientists can easily trace all phenotypes in such individuals, allowing us to understand the origins and evolution of the first-person eye and the social, genetic, and lifestyle attributes of all the other members of animals. This means that the use of this technique to identify more specific phenotypes could revolutionize information management through multiple