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Here you'll find a list of all the key terms on the site with a brief definition. For more information, click on any of the terms to be directed to its Wikipedia article.

Helpful Definitions...

    Adaptive Value: the culmination of traits which influence the overall fitness of an animal

    Batesian mimicry: a form of mimicry in which a harmless species resembles one which may be dangerous to a shared predator

    Cephalopod: a class of molluscs, including squid, cuttlefish, and octopi, that are characterized in part by their large head and tentacles

    Crypsis: referring to any number of methods an animal uses to avoid detection

    Epipelagic: Epipelagic refers to the zone in the ocean where sunlight fully penetrates and plants are able to perform fitness

    Fitness: most often described as an individual's ability to pass on its genes to the next generation of the species

    Homologous: referring to pairs of chromosomes which code for the same trait (though not necessarily carrying identical information)

    Locus: a particular location on a gene

    Mullerian mimicry: unrelated harmful species, which share a common ancestor, closely resemble each other in their warning signals

    Ontogeny: the study of the developmental history of an organism based on external factors (both living and non-living) in its environment

    Phylogeny: an evolutionary history of a species, looking at its relatedness to others

    Plasticity: an organism with a given genotype's ability to change in response to variations in its environment

    Polymorphism: when a gene results in more than one version of a certain characteristic

    "Supergene": a group of closely related genes on a chromosome which are inherited together