Preface

Bugsville challenges you to design and run experiments to estimate the heritability of a quantitative trait and to predict how a population will respond to selection. The analytical tools you’ll need are described briefly here, and discussed in more detail in Chapter 9 of my book, Evolutionary Analysis.

The organisms in the population you will study are ladybugs. The trait you will analyze is number of spots.

Convergent lady beetles, Hippodamia convergens, showing variation in spot number.
Convergent lady beetles, Hippodamia convergens, showing variation in spot number. John Rusk / Wikimedia commons.

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about the genetics of spot number in real ladybugs of any kind! In the individual-based model used here, spot number can vary from zero to fourteen and arises from the combined influence of several genes of small effect plus a random environmental component.

When you get to the later portions of the exercise described here, you may find this worksheet useful.

Bugsville is a work in progress, as is this tutorial. If you have comments or suggestions, please get in touch with me at herronjc at uw.edu. Thanks!