Asexual and sexual reproduction Transitional Reasoning Practice

Questions

1. 1.

   A biology laboratory maintains two separate cultures of a freshwater invertebrate: Culture 1 reproduces strictly by asexual budding, while Culture 2 reproduces sexually through gametes produced by meiosis. When an identical strain of a novel pathogenic bacterium is introduced into both environments, all individuals in Culture 1 die within forty-eight hours, whereas several individuals in Culture 2 survive and continue to reproduce. Based on this outcome, which of the following best explains the evolutionary advantage demonstrated by sexual reproduction?

   • A) It allows populations to expand more rapidly because every individual can directly generate offspring without the energetic cost of mating.
   • B) It generates genetic variation among offspring, increasing the probability that some individuals possess traits that withstand environmental threats.
   • C) It entirely purges all harmful recessive mutations from the population's genome within a single reproductive cycle.
   • D) It conserves cellular energy by avoiding the complex chromosome-pairing events that occur during typical mitotic cell divisions.

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