After decades of studying extraterrestrial organisms on Triton, you and your colleagues have developed a pretty good cladogram (
not yet time-calibrated) of alien life, and have developed a good understanding of species ranges and distributions. Use no more than 2 sentences or bullet points per subpart. (a) One clade of aliens has significantly many orders of magnitude more putative species than any of its close relative clades. What is one potential hypothesis for this phylogenetic pattern that we discussed in class?- (b) You observe a strong latitudinal diversity gradient on Triton that is analogous to the one we find on Earth for many clades. Briefly describe this observation, and propose one explanation for this pattern
The effect might be due to the variation in the gene expression in the organism. In this way, the variety of the genetic pool is likely to result in a diversity of the gene pool or genome. Because of the mutation and the environmental factors, there is likely to be a slight variation of the species. This results in a slight difference in the phenotypic expression.
