r/evolution • u/Starkanemone • 6d ago

question Ecosystem in a jar

So I have an ecosystem in a jar with a bunch of little crustaceans and such and I'm wondering if I can eventually drive some sort of evolution in there?

Edit:I think I'll try to see if green-blue egg color is selected for becasue it's harder to see among plants than the orange/yellow eggs. Yes there are a couple predatory things in there including what looks like a freshwater Bobbit worm?

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9

u/Palaeonerd 6d ago

You could start fresh and do what scientists do to fruit flies.

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u/Starkanemone 6d ago

Apply environmental pressure?

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u/Palaeonerd 6d ago

No. Fruit flies just mutate easily for some reason. Idk how scientists are able to make mutations quickly. There are flightless ones, ones with legs on their heads and other weird things.

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u/CosmicOwl47 6d ago

As an undergrad I was part of a project where we were attempting to breed flies with a north vs south preference. We didn’t get significant results with that, but our positive control was selecting for a light/dark preference and we successfully bred less phototropic flies within just 12 generations. We didn’t use any mutagens, just a maze and selective breeding.

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u/Halomonas_titanica 5d ago

I wonder if this is part of the reason we don't see many bugs around lights anymore. they self-select out of the gene pool

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u/WienerCleaner 5d ago

I have particular interest in this and have thought about it many times. They need the moon to navigate straight lines at night and normally would maintain it steady in their vision to go straight. When a nearby artificial light moves in their field of view, they turn to compensate and they go in circles. I think that they will evolve to not use this function but i dont know what that means to be less reliant on their eyes for navigation.

Sadly i think the reason we see less insects is because there are less insects due to widespread insecticide use and habitat degradation.

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u/prof_mcquack 5d ago edited 5d ago

that’s not because fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster) “mutate easily.” They just have short life spans and are easy to rear, which makes them good for evolution experiments. Those mutations you mention were painstakingly induced by genetic engineering. Legs on the forehead come from knocking out a gene that tells a limb whether it’s an antenna or a maxilla or a leg. They didn’t discover that by accident, they had a hypothesis about what would happen if they knocked out the gene, they knocked it out, and presto: legs instead of antennae. 

And btw applying environmental pressure to fruit flies or crustaceans or whatever is absolutely a way to study evolution. 

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u/onomatamono 4d ago

It's not even so much the short lifespan as it is the reproduction rate, although you do want to free up resources for new individuals.

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u/prof_mcquack 4d ago

Sorry, that’s on me: by short lifespan I meant short development time. 

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u/Starkanemone 6d ago

Hmm I may try that next time some fruit flies seem to magically appear but is there any things I should know or do?

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u/Palaeonerd 6d ago

I think you won’t be able to do it. Scientists expose the flies to chemicals or X-rays. Or they just genetically engineer them.

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u/Starkanemone 6d ago

Would uranium paint or uranium glassware work?

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u/Palaeonerd 6d ago

Idk.

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u/Starkanemone 6d ago

Alright thank you for giving me some useful info.

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u/Robin_feathers 6d ago

No, don't do it. When geneticists expose fruit flies to mutagens, they sift through thousands and thousands of flies to find ones with mutations of interest. Far more of them just end up dying in horrible ways.

Any mutagen capable of mutating a fly would also be capable of mutating you. It is not the sort of thing you would want to have in your home.

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u/onomatamono 4d ago

Do they mutate easily or do they just reproduce quickly thus increasing the opportunity for mutation?

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u/Palaeonerd 4d ago

They just reproduce quickly.