A male walrus lives to be 20 years old and mates with 18 females during its life. A second male lives to be 10 years old but mates with 44 females. Which male has natural selection “favoured”?” Does the second male have high or low fitness? Explain your reasoning.

Natural selection is one of the concepts of evolution,it was propounded by a scientist known as Charles Darwin. In natural selection, organisms that have a more suitable traits survive and have a higher adaptation to the environment giving them more room to reproduce and give rise to new offsprings of their kind.

From the question, A male walrus that mates with 45 females has a higher favour than the walrus that mates with 18 females.

This is because,the walrus that mates with 45 females will have a larger number of offsprings than the other walrus making it to pass it's alleles(traits) to the next generation of walrus.

With this,the impact his alleles will have will be greater than the one of the walrus that mates with only 18 females.

fertilization, pictured in figure 24.23a is the process in which gametes (an egg and sperm) fuse to form a zygote. the egg and sperm each contain one set of chromosomes. to ensure that the offspring has only one complete diploid set of chromosomes, only one sperm must fuse with one egg. in mammals, the egg is protected by a layer of extracellular matrix consisting mainly of glycoproteins called the zona pellucida. when a sperm binds to the zona pellucida, a series of biochemical events, called the acrosomal reactions, take place. in placental mammals, the acrosome contains digestive enzymes that initiate the degradation of the glycoprotein matrix protecting the egg and allowing the sperm plasma membrane to fuse with the egg plasma membrane, as illustrated in figure 24.23b. the fusion of these two membranes creates an opening through which the sperm nucleus is transferred into the ovum. the nuclear membranes of the egg and sperm break down and the two haploid genomes condense to form a diploid genome.

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