Page 15 - Children's Book

My home, Los Bañnos Grandes, California, is very
vast. Oscar, Yuri, and Billy’s relatives are spread out
over lots of land, so they do not always interact

with each other. After my investigations, I found
that the size of each lizard’s family depended on the
size of the other lizards’ families. The lizard that had
the smallest family size, or the lizard that had the
most rare throat color in a specific area, is the

lizard that soon became the most common. After
some research I learned that this occurs because
the throat colors of my lizard friends are based on
microgeographic variation which in this case was

also affected by frequency dependent selection.
Microgeographic variation is when certain versions
of traits are more concentrated in specific areas
of a territory that an organism inhabits. Frequency
dependent selection occurs when the fitness of a
trait depends on the relative amounts of the

different phenotypes or genotypes of an organism
in a certain location.