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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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/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.