Pea fowl (peacocks and peahens) show sexual dimorphism -- males have long blue-green tail feathers with eyespots, while females have short brown tail feathers. Which statement best describes the graphed data about peacocks?

Question

A.  There are no peacocks with less than 140 eyespots.

B.  The fewer eyespots that a peacock has in his tail, the more mates he attracts.

C.  Actually eyespots have very little to do with mate-attracting activities.

D.  The more eyespots that a peacock has in his tail, the more mates he attracts.

E.  There are no peacocks with more than 165 eyespots.





Clarify question:

What is the key concept addressed by the question?

 

What type of thinking is required?



Gather Content:

What do you already know about sexual selection? What other information is related to the question? 





Choose Answer:

Given what you now know, what information is most likely to produce the correct answer?





Reflection on Process:

Did your problem-solving process lead you to the correct answer? If not, where did the process break down or lead you astray? How can you revise your approach to produce a more desirable result?

 

Answer 1

D.  The more eyespots that a peacock has in his tail, the more mates he attracts.


Clarify question:
What is the key concept addressed by the question?
It comes from the section of the textbook that discusses sexual selection. Does the huge ornate tail of the peacock provide some kind of advantage? The data on this graph addresses that question. Once you’ve understood the graph you need to pick between the choices
 
What type of thinking is required?
This is an analyze question

Gather Content:
What do you already know about sexual selection? What other information is related to the question? 
There is a positive relationship, more spots = more mates. When you look at the choices, the graph is best described by only one of the choices. There is no information about peacocks with fewer than 140 or more than 165 spots. They may or may not exist but the graph has nothing to say about that. Eye spots clearly have a relationship to mating, and it is a strong positive relationship.


Choose Answer:
 
Given what you now know, what information is most likely to produce the correct answer?
The answer is “The more eyespots that a peacock has in his tail, the more mates he attracts.”
That is the only choice that is supported by the data presented.


Reflection on Process:
Did your problem-solving process lead you to the correct answer? If not, where did the process break down or lead you astray? How can you revise your approach to produce a more desirable result?
This was an analyze question. You needed to extract the information from the graph and pick the correct choice. The information presented was about sexual selection. Knowing about sexual selection makes the graph more understandable, but the key to answering this question lies in your ability to extract the information from the graph.