Isabela used this dataset to ask whether guppies benefit from moving from one place to another. In this study, she focused on one type of benefit: having a higher number of offspring. It is through reproduction that animals pass on their genes. This means that the more offspring an individual has, the more frequent their genetics will be in subsequent generations. That is, if those offspring survive!
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Eva FischerFirst, Isabela used the existing dataset to find out how far each fish moved: if Fish 1 was captured in Portion A of a stream in February and then in Portion B of the same stream in March, Isabela knew it had to move from A to B. She could use the timepoints to estimate how far each individual had traveled that month.
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Sarah FitzpatrickSecond, Isabela used genetics to find out how many surviving offspring each fish had. She looked at genetic markers to determine familial relationships between individuals in each stream. For example, two fish that shared 50% of their genes were probably a parent and an offspring. In this case, the older individual would be marked as the parent. Isabela used the genetic information to build a pedigree, or a chart that documents each generation of a population. That way she could track how many offspring each parent had produced.
She used these data to answer her question about whether there are benefits to traveling more. Isabela also wanted to compare whether the potential benefits of dispersal differed across the sexes. Males must compete for females in order to mate. Isabela wanted to know if males that moved more were able to mate with more females and have more offspring.