Dr. Alex Young would like to know about your progress in solving the mystery about the rough-skinned newts. In the space below, answer the Chapter 1 Question: What caused this newt population to become more poisonous? Use what you have learned so far to consider these claims:

Claim 1: Individual newts became more poisonous because they wanted to.
Claim 2: The newt population became more poisonous because of something in the environment.
Revised Claim 2: The newt population became more poisonous because the snakes in this environment caused poison to be an adaptive trait

Choose one or more claims to support with evidence and reasoning. You may also want to explain why one or more of the claims is definitely not correct.

Be sure to use some of the vocabulary words you have learned so far:

adaptive trait
distribution
environment
non-adaptive trait
population
trait
variation