You Are Hired as a Consultant for a New Venture

Multiple Choice

You are hired as a consultant for a new venture: pet-squirrel breeding! Because customers prefer bushy tails on their pet squirrels, you are asked to help produce bushy-tailed squirrels from a local population as quickly and efficiently as possible. Of course, you know that bushy tails are a quantitative genetic trait in squirrels. Suppose you are hired by a breeder in Canada to help set up a breeding program. You hate the cold weather and want to avoid any unnecessary trips to Canada. Can you take what you have learned about your local population of squirrels and apply it to the Canadian population? Why or why not?

A) Yes. You can compare the two populations as long as you are studying the same trait in both populations.
B) Yes. You can compare the two populations because their narrow-sense heritabilities will be very similar.
C) Yes. You can compare the two populations because heritability calculations require environmental differences between populations to be omitted.
D) No. Heritability only applies to a particular population in a particular environment.
E) No. While heritability can apply across different populations, it would not apply here because the populations vary too greatly in their environments.