I WILL DO 100 POINT FREE POINTS IF THIS GETS PROPERLY ANSWERED A student is observing a group of fry, or young fish, in a pond. Because the fry appear identical in shape, size, and color, the student concludes that they were the result of asexual reproduction. Is this conclusion necessarily correct? Use scientific reasoning to support your answer.

No this is not quite correct.

Explanation: The appearance of offspring does not completely determine whether it was produced sexually or asexually. For example, offspring that is identified as asexually reproduced is offspring that did not require the union of two sex cells. On the other hand, offspring that is defined as sexually reproduced requires two individuals of different sex cells.

Hope this helps! :3 Can I please have brainliest and those 100 points? lol

For most living things, sexual reproduction has proven the best overall strategy to perpetuate a species in the rough-and-tumble, unpredictable fray of natural selection. With two partners combining varied genes, a species has more flexibility to adapt to changing environments.

There are, however, rare examples of asexual species that reproduce by cloning. Each offspring is genetically identical to the parent, with little variation generation after generation. (Mutations do create a minor amount of change.)

If asexual reproduction survives at all, conditions must sometimes favor it, even in competition for a niche with sexually reproducing species. Some insects, like aphids, are both asexual and sexual reproducers. Though rare, those species that reproduce asexually tend to persist.

Efficiency, for one thing, is on the side of asexual organisms: Without the need for males, every clonal individual passes a full set of identical genes onto the next generation. In addition, a single female can establish a new population. This gives asexual creatures on the fringes of a habitat an edge in colonizing a new one.

Clones generally hit a dead end, going extinct when their limited variation collides with changing environmental conditions or with better-surviving sexual reproducers. With their unusual way of reproducing, they continue to fascinate scientists because they are natural experiments in interactions between fixed genotypes and varying environment.

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