Science - Lesson #1: Urbanization and Selective Pressure

Science

Lesson #1:

Natural Selection: Urbanization As A

Selecting Pressure

Learning Target🎯

I can explain how urbanization creates selective pressures that lead to specific adaptations in Puerto Rican anoles

Success Criteria ✅

Success Criteria:

I am successful when I can...

🌟 Engage: 👀 Observe and describe differences between urban and rural environments that might affect animal survival.
🔍 Explore:📊 Analyze examples to identify specific environmental challenges anoles face in cities (like smooth surfaces and limited vegetation).
💡 Explain: 🦎 Describe how certain traits (larger, stickier toe pads and longer limbs) help anoles survive and reproduce better in urban habitats.
🚀 Elaborate: 🔮 Predict how urban anole populations might continue to change over generations and justify my ideas using academic language.
🎯 Evaluate: 📝Use Evidence from scientific studies on Puerto Rican anoles to support a claim about how urbanization drives evolutionary adaptations through natural selection.

Standards:

🎯 HS-LS4-4 (Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity)

Construct an explanation based on evidence for how natural selection leads to adaptation of populations.

Reminders:

Practice Regents #3 due Friday May 8th for those who did not take the mock.

Part #1

Warm-Up

Part 2:

2 Box Induction

Peppered Moths

Directions:

Compare and Contrast the two boxes.

How are they related?

How are they different?

Lesson #1: Selecting Agent

Part 3

Echo-Echo

Choral - Choral

Vocabulary

Selecting Agent: is a specific factor in the environment that actively influences which traits are favorable.

Example: Birds that hunt moths are the selecting agent. They determine survival by easily spotting and capturing moths that don’t blend in with their environment.

Natural Selection: is the process by which organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and reproduce more successfully, passing on their advantageous traits to their offspring

Part 4

Common Thread

Connections

Species, Ecosystem, Urban Environment, Anole, Evolution, Traits, Toe Pads, Limb Length, Adaptations, Habitats, Diversity, Forest Environment, Survival, Challenge

Task:

1) As the video plays, listen for your word.

2) Find someone new with a vocab word that relates to yours.

3) Create a sentence using the conjunctions BECAUSE, BUT and SO to show the relation between the two pieces of vocabulary