One of a Kind: The Wonders of Biodiversity

Our group experimented with collards. They are almost two feet tall and have little holes because of pests like caterpillars.The leaves are really big in size, like a big piece of spinach expect thicker. The leaves take up about 80% of the white stems. It is pretty much a plant that is related to and sort of looks like cabbage.

It is not really easy to see what the parent plant was like, but from phenotypes we can determine some information about the parent plant. I can tell that the parent plants had large leaves it was a recessive trait that appeared twice from both parents. The parent plants were probably average plants because they seem to look the same as most collards I have seen. To predict the collards offspring you would have to know the characteristics of the plants that will be bred together. Punnett Squares are used to compare the parents’ traits to see the different possible traits for the offspring. For the baby plants to acquire these traits, they would have to obtain their parents’ sex cells. In meiosis, the sex cells exchange chromosomes through random assortment. This is exactly how these plants and their descendants will pass traits to their offspring. The offspring could look exactly or partially like their parents because of random assortment (they randomly exchange parts of themselves [chromosomes]). The collards are in the same species of plants, but they look different because of the numerous allele combinations and how they develop differently. The collards are in the Acepahala group in the brassica oleracea species because they have been categorized by development of the plants. The development depends on genetics and genetics depend on the parents’ sex cell’s genetics and random assortment.

For example, wild cabbage (the ancestral species) and collards are the same species. The reason why there are so many variations between collards and wild cabbage is because of environmental factors and cross breeding. This can cause an infinite number of possibilities. They all came from the same origin, but outer forces and cross breeding is basically why they all look so different. The possibilities are endless, but not always highly probable because of the laws of nature. That’s all for now!