I’m a horse!

Continuing with genetics discussions in my science classes, today we focused on selective breeding. Selective breeding is the process by which two organisms are cross-breed because they have desired traits that are wanted to pass on to the next generation. In order to demonstrate how this works, today we performed a lab using race horses. Each group of students were given a first generation horse to start with. Each of these horse had specific traits that consisted of color, speed, stamina, temperament, fitness, and size. The goal was to great the best possible racing horse by breeding five different generations.

The owners of “Duklas” carefully breeding their horses

Students then had the choice of cross breeding their horse with a championship sire. Each sire was a former championship horse (Smarty Jones above) that had varying traits. Students then took the traits from their first generation horse and crossed them with the traits from their sire. How did they decided what traits to pass on? Each group was given a spinning wheel, if their wheel landed on a even number the next generation would inherit the traits of the sire….if odd, they would inherit those traits of their first generation. This step would be repeated 5 times.

Tomorrow will be our race day. We will use a specific formula (thank you Mr. Campbell) to find out who has the best horse. In addition, we all know that horse racing is all about the names so tomorrow will be voting on the best horse name out of all the classes. I have included a short list of some of these award winning stallions below, feel free to leave a comment and tell us which name you think is the best!

• Couture
• Karma
• Juicy
• Radi
• Salty Spittoon
• Swine
• Duklas Robert
• Mr. Cummings
• Spartacus

Mr. McClung