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Natural Selection and the Case of the Peppered Moth
If you're anything like me and you spend a lot of time talking about Interesting Facts and Things to anyone who will listen, you may have heard a slightly warped account of the story of the peppered moth. Maybe someone said something like: "Oh yeah and in England there was this moth that turned black during the industrial revolution due to all the coal dust in the air". Which is... not exactly true.
Let me start the story from the beginning. Before the industrial revolution, peppered moths (Biston betularia) were distributed across England, Europe and North America. They existed in 3 morphs: typica (mostly white), carbonaria (mostly black) and insularia (inbetween). Note: I'm mainly going to talk about the typica and the carbonaria morph here.
Before the industrial revolution, the typica morph was the predominant morph. Peppered moths lived in forests filled with light trees and lots of lichen, a good place for a typica morph to blend in. The carbonaria morphs were living life on hard mode, though. They did not blend in, and were more easily picked out by predators like birds. Below you can see how well a typica morph blends into lichen.
Then the fire nation attacked. Jk, then came the industrial revolution. Factories were pumping out coal fumes into the air, covering forests nearby with coal dust and killing the lichen that grew on them. In these forests, the carbonaria morph blended in better. Predators began to pick out typica morphs more often. And so, carbonaria morphs became the predominant morph in forests near industrialized areas.
Naturalists, noticing this, wanted an adequate answer on why this was happening. In the 1950s Bernard Davis Kettlewell used various methods to test the hypothesis that it was natural selection. And indeed it was. Typica morphs were 2x more likely to be eaten in a polluted forest than carbonaria morphs, and vice versa.
This phenomenon was so common, and observed in many other moth species across industrialized areas, that it was even given a name: industrial melanism.
So there you go. The full story of the peppered moth :)
Oh and I should add that in areas where the effects of industrialization were reversed, the typica morph once again becomes more common.
Sources:
Peppered moths: moth life cycle
Peppered moths: natural selection
Peppered moths: dr ketllewell
reading 1800s scientist beef with the same excitement as I would read a 50k+ frank iero/gerard way fanfiction on ao3
THIS IS WHAT IM GETTING MY BIOLOGY DEGREE FOR
I KNEW I WOULD FIND CHARLES DARWIN YAOI ON AO3
im kinda sad i won't be the first person to write this but OF COURSE THERE'S ALREADY CHARLES DARWIN YAOI ON AO3
"Deixa acontecer
naturalmente"
Okay so basically im monky
Charles Darwin
Jacob Frye. The pleasure’s all mine.
#handsome face and cocky attitude
I justt found a super cool website! It’s called Darwin Online and it's meant to be the world’s largest resource on Charles Darwin. They’re supported by Cambridge University and supposedly have 230,000 pages of his stuff, works about him, and even a complete collection of all Darwin's publications! From what I understand, it’s all entirely free to access! http://darwin-online.org.uk/
“But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.”
- Charles Darwin, in a letter dated October 1, 1861 [x]
3D printed Darwins Cladogram Tree with Finches designed by Joaquin Baldwin. Happy Darwin Day! #charlesdarwin #darwin #evolution #trees #treeoflife #shapeways
MAN OR APE?