Biodiversity ❤ Earth
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What is Biodiversity?!?
Biodiversity is the variety of life of every single thing on this earth in all of its forms and interactions among each other.
Biodiversity is responsible for almost every single aspect of your life from the air you breath, to the food you consume, and to the water you drink! The world is connected form various levels of life through many interactions and dependencies.
When speaking about biodiversity, we could be referring to a small river, to a park, to a town, or even the whole earth. These different levels of biodiversity are called Alpha, Beta and Gamma diversity, all which are increasing levels in size. But biodiversity at its core, is the interactions between all the living things.
Now let is break it down further.
Biodiversity can divided into three main groups.
- Genetic Diversity
- Organismal Diversity
- Ecological Diversity
Genetic Diversity
Genetic diversity refers to the genetic encoding that structures organisms such as the nucleotides, genes and chromosomes. It also emcompasses the variation of the genetic make-up of individuals within a population and also between populations.
Genetic diversity serves to allow populations to adapt to the ever changing environment. With variation and mutation, it is more likely that individuals in populations may contain variations in their alleles that are more strongly suited for the environment. These individuals are more likely to produce offspring that bear the allele. Thus, the population will continue for more generations due to the success of the individuals.
Mutations are random. Not all mutations are helpful for the population and in most cases is not, but a beneficial mutation is more likely to persist and have a more positive long term effect on the population.
Because the mutations are random, larger populations are more likely to have larger gene pools compared to smaller populations. A small gene pool is…
