<span>Neutral mutations are neither harmful nor beneficial.
Therefore, they are invisible to natural selection. (Since they neither improve nor worsen one individual's chances of survival and reproduction over another.)
However neutral mutations can still spread into the population by just random replications and matings. This is called genetic drift.
In other words, they are 'silent'. They are mutations that exist and propagate in populations, but seem to have no effect at all.
The reason they can become important to evolution is that a day can come when they *do* have an effect. In other words, even though an individual mutation may have no immediate effect on survival or reproduction, a *combination* of neutral mutations may provide some new benefit or harm ... at which point natural selection *will* act on that combination.
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Plankton is part of an aquatic ecosystem
<span>Genetic variation can be caused by mutation (which can
create entirely new alleles in a population), random mating, random
fertilization, and recombination between homologous chromosomes during
meiosis (which reshuffles alleles within an organism's offspring)</span>
You could put salt-crystals outside during different times of the day when the temperature drops or rises.
