The mountain gorilla, spotted owl, giant panda, snow leopard, and grizzly bear are all endangered by human encroachment on their environments. Another thing these animals have in common is their K-selected life history traits. Why might they be more easily endangered than animals with r-selected life history traits? What general type of survivorship curve would you expect these species to exhibit? Explain your answer.

Question

Accepted Answer

Hi everyone, here's our next problem. It says identify the incorrect statement about K. Selected species. So when we think about K. Selected species, we want to think about R. K. Selection theory. Just as a reminder, we recall that. That says that the traits of the offspring are a result of a trade off between quantity and quality, you might say So the idea of quantity being large numbers of offspring that take little parental involvement and mature quickly but have a lower chance of surviving to adulthood as a result versus species that have smaller numbers of offspring that involve a lot of parental involvement, mature slowly but have a higher chance of surviving to adulthood. So in different situations, different uh say strategies have more advantages. So we're looking for the incorrect statement about K. Selected species. So I've got my sort of comparison chart here, we can look at to remind us of those differences so that we can pick up that incorrect statement about K. Selected species. So we see here that K selection involves more investment in fewer offspring, each of the higher chance of survival. They tend to live close to the carrying capacity in more predictable environments so they don't need to be able to suddenly have a whole bunch of offspring. Um Just have a steady rate of increase their offspring need more parental care and take longer to mature. They tend to be larger animals and they tend to live longer. That's as opposed to our selection over here which produce many offspring. Each with a lower chance of survival. They tend to live in less stable environments. So in those cases disadvantage when conditions are good to be able to reproduce many offspring really quickly because you never know when things are going to be bad um to be able to reproduce quickly. They have high fecundity, short periods of generation and they mature quickly to adulthood. And finally they tend to be smaller animals with shorter lifespans. So let's look through our answer choices here. Looking for the incorrect statement. Choice A says they live in predictable environments. Again, we're looking at our case. Elections will highlight that over here and case election says yes, they live in more predictable environments. So that is a true statement about K. Species and therefore not our correct answer. Choice B says their body sizes larger and lifespan is long. And that is correct. So again, another true statement. Not our answer choices says they produce numerous small offspring. Well, numerous small offspring is over here in our selection. So that's false. And therefore Choice C. Is going to be our correct answer here. As the incorrect statement about K. Selected species. Finally, we've got choice D. They take longer to mature to adulthood. And yes, we have that under K. Selected species. So that's a true statement and not our answer. So the incorrect statement about K. Selected species is choice C. They produced numerous small offspring. See you in the next video

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Key Concepts

K-selected vs. r-selected species

Survivorship curves

Human encroachment and habitat loss