Reference no: EM133610676

Question

The size of individuals in an animal species is affected by the availability of resources. Scientists have noted that there are instances where individuals in an animal species on an island will be much larger than the individuals on the mainland insular gigantism"). Likewise, there are instances where individuals are much smaller than the individuals on the mainland (insular dwarfism". An example of this is the Giant Tortoise: it is the world's largest tortoise and exists only on the remote Galápagos Islands. In evolutionary biology, this is called the "Island Effect" and is an area of current research. A group of Brazilian researchers studying the Island Effect measured many characteristics of Boana albomarginata frogs on both islands and the mainland (Rebouças et al., 2018). One of the characteristics that they measured was the distance between the frogs' eyes and their nostrils - the Eye-Nostril Distance (END). The data collected by the researchers showed that the distribution of END values is approximately normal for both Island frogs and Mainland frogs. The means and standard deviations of the END for these frogs are shown in the table below. Region Island Mainland Mean (S) 4.317 3.861 Standard Deviation (S) 0.5193 0.4953.