The ancestor to the Hawaiian crickets in the genus Laupala originally colonized the oldest of the islands in the Hawaiian archipelago.As new islands were formed,crickets from the older island would colonize the younger island.Because members of this genus are flightless,these migration events were likely to be extremely rare and would include a small number of migrants.Nonselective differences in allele frequencies in this genus are likely due to

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Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The fact that crickets from older islands colonized the younger ones and that these crickets are flightless suggests that migration events were rare and involved only a small number of migrants. This scenario fits the definition of a founder event, where a small group of individuals establishes a new population with a limited set of genetic variations. As a result, the allele frequencies in the newly colonized population could be different from those in the source population due to genetic drift (random changes in allele frequencies), which reinforces the idea that choice E is the best answer. Mutations could play a role in generating new genetic variations, but they are not likely to be the primary driver of nonselective differences in allele frequencies in this genus.

The Ancestor to the Hawaiian Crickets in the Genus Laupala