Module 3

 Fitness-

       In my mind fitness is something that can be both very easy to define and very hard to define all at once. I would define it as how well an organism is able to live and reproduce throughout its lifetime. In a natural population, this includes how many offspring the animal in question has, how long it lives, how well it evades predators, and how easy it is to gather the food it needs to survive. You could shorten it down however, how long it lives generally decides how many offspring it has, which increases its overall fitness. 

    As an example, if you look at a population of something like whitetail deer in the wild, The deer that end up having the most offspring would be the fittest in the population. To quantify this, tracker bands could be put on deer in a specific area and population, and the amount of offspring they produce in their lifetime could be carefully monitored. In addition to this, you could take into account how many whitetail deer die from predators, natural causes, or other things like this. After a while, you can get a gauge for how long each whitetail deer is supposed to live, and how many offspring they produce throughout their lifespan. I for one think it would be very interesting to do this for populations of whitetail deer across America and see how the fitness levels compare depending on the area the population being studied is in. Would whitetail deer in Kansas be more fit than somewhere like Wyoming for example? or Louisiana? Once you have that data you run into questions like it the populations themselves that are adapted better to their specific area or is the environment just harder to live in? outside of human hunters, it's easy to assume that whitetail deer have fewer predators in Kansas than they would in somewhere like Wyoming for example. Kansas has coyotes, a natural predator of whitetail deer, and not much else. Wyoming has beers, mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes. This is part of the reason I decided to include lifespan in my definition of fitness. While deer might live for a shorter amount of time in Wyoming due to the increase in natural predators, The amount of offspring might not necessarily be decreased. It depends on when Whitetail deer have the bulk off their offspring compared to their lifespan in each area.