Environmental Influences on the Traits of Living Things Environmental influences are things found in the environment, the area in which an organism lives, that effects the physical traits of the organism. Examples of environmental influences are light, temperature, chemicals, diseases, amount of rainfall and water and food sources.

Sunlight can bleach your hair.

Sunlight can cause skin to darken or redden and blister.

Sunlight can cause skin cancer and premature aging (wrinkling) of the skin.

Temperature and light are environmental factors that may influence traits. Himalayan rabbits raised in temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius will be white, where the same rabbits raised below 20 degrees Celsius will have a white body with dark brown ears, nose and feet.

Temperature can determine the gender of leopard geckos. If the gecko’s eggs are incubated at 79 degrees Fahrenheit they will probably be female. If they are incubated at degrees Fahrenheit, they will be male.

When women are exposed to certain drugs and chemicals while pregnant their babies can be born with birth defects.

Eating fatty foods can cause an organism to be overweight and can lead to heart disease

Smoking cigarettes can cause cancers like lung cancer and diseases like emphysema which effects the lungs and makes it difficult to breathe.

Tree leaves change from green to orange and yellow in the fall because there are fewer hours of daylight and the temperatures are cooler.

Snowshoe hare’s fur changes to white when the daylight shortens in the fall and changes back to brown when the daylight lengthens in the spring. Baby snowshoe hare Brown phase Changing from white to brown White phase

Giving premature babies too much oxygen can cause blindness, whereas not enough can cause brain damage.

Air pollution can cause asthma.

A weed killer called Atrazine causes male frogs to become female frogs in laboratory tests.

Farm accidents can cause amputation of limbs.

Dry air can cause people to have dry scaly skin

The heat from fire causes Jack Pine tree cones to open and release seeds.

When fish eggs are exposed to the chemical magnesium chloride the fish develops with one eye instead of two.

An insecticide called DDT caused Peregrine Falcons and Bald Eagles to lay eggs with shells that were so thin they broke when the birds sat on them.

Vitamin D deficiency can lead to poor bone formation, including rickets. Rickets causes the bones to soften leading to breaks and deformity. Vitamin D is found in fatty fish and egg yolk. Environmental Influence of Poor Nutrition

Vitamin A deficiency affects about 100 million children worldwide and causes blindness and impairs the immune system, reducing children's resistance to diarrhea, which kills 2.2 million children a year, and measles, which kills nearly 1 million each year. Vitamin A is found in carrots, squash, beet greens, turkey, fish, pumpkin and chicken. Environmental Influence of Poor Nutrition

Environmental influences are things found in the environment that effects the physical traits of the organism.