LAB 2 Date: 9/30/2020 Title: Natural Selection- Natural Selection in Insects Purpose: The purpose of this lab is to investigate natural selection in the peppered moth and see how the environment can affect the selection process. Materials: - Typica white moths - Carbonaria black moths Observations: We counted the number of white and black moths in each environment- clean or polluted forestand recorded our data in data tables. Analysis: For the clean forest, we used moths with initial allele frequencies of D = 0.10 and d = 0.90. After 5 generations, the allele frequencies were D = 0.03 and d = 0.97, and the most common genotype was dd and white-colored for the phenotype. Most of the G5 moths were white. For the polluted forest, we released moths with initial allele frequencies of D = 0.50 and d = 0.50. The G5 moths’ allele frequencies were D = 0.86 and d = 0.14. DD (black) was the most frequent genotype, followed by Dd (black), and then dd (white). Most of the G5 moths were black. Conclusion: In the peppered moth, the black allele (D) is dominant to the recessive white allele (d). There were mostly white/Typica moths in the clean forest and mostly black/Carbonaria moths in the polluted forest. The differences in allele frequencies demonstrate how environmental changes can affect the process of natural selection, where the clean forest had white trees and polluted forest black trees. Therefore, moths in the clean forest mutated to the dd phenotype to blend in with the white trees, explaining the consistently high frequency of the d allele. Overtime in the polluted forest, the DD and Dd genotypes grew in frequency as more moths became black to fit in with the polluted, black trees.