It's also passed down maternally, so it has many uses in that aspect

maybe you could use fehling's solution and measure color change using a spectrophotometer? There may or may not be conversions for the measurement you get; you'd have to look it up. Then you could look up the ratio of glucose to monosaccharides for the plant you're using, and then from those two pie...

may not be the desired answer, but duckweed is the smallest flowering plant

Look up lac and trp operons. they are both fine examples of negative and positive controls, respectively.
However, to answer your question in short... do you think it would be prudent for a bacterium to produce an enzyme for a sugar that it isn't ingesting?

what are the advantages of each? for example, look up "r-selected organisms" and "k-selected organisms." Each of these have distinct trade offs involving energy and success of passing on genes.

Well said. Saprophytic in this context could be rather misleading.

he's got it, and this is a page for the coefficient of relation. It has the equation for relatedness, for future reference if you need it. and way to be thorough in trumping your roommate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficien ... lationship

why would you say the spider is saprophytic?

seems like an interesting and rather specific course, but I can speculate that the phylogeny of insect pollinators is important because understanding their evolution and ancestral species could give insight into the origin of relations that the pollinators share with plants. Some insects and flowers...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracellular_matrix
That link talks about the extracellular matrix... hopefully it will help you answer your questions!

I got this from the genetic drift wikipedia page, but i kinda like it, especially the last bit: The process of genetic drift can be illustrated using 20 marbles in a jar to represent 20 organisms in a population.[4] Consider this jar of marbles as the starting population. Half of the marbles in the ...

I suppose this is also nice in showing function and composition:
http://www.slideshare.net/AngellicaSter ... na-7353343