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  3. Survival and successful reproduction usually requires the activities of animals to be coordinated with predictable events around

Survival and successful reproduction usually requires the activities of animals to be coordinated with predictable events around

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问题     Survival and successful reproduction usually requires the activities of animals to be coordinated with predictable events around them. Consequently, the timing and rhythms of biological functions must closely match periodic events like the solar day, the tides, the lunar cycle, and the seasons. The relations between animal activity and these periods, particularly for the daily rhythms, have been of such interest and importance that a huge amount of work has been done on them and the special research field of chronobiology has emerged. Normally, the constantly changing levels of an animals activity-sleeping, feeding, moving, reproducing, metabolizing, and producing enzymes and hormones, for example—are well coordinated with environmental rhythms, but the key question is whether the animal’s schedule is driven by external cues, such as sunrise or sunset, or is instead dependent somehow on internal timers that themselves generate the observed biological rhythms. Almost universally, biologists accept the idea that all eukaryotes (a category that includes most organisms except bacteria and certain algae) have internal clocks. By isolating organisms completely from external periodic cues, biologists learned that organisms have internal clocks. For instance, apparently normal daily periods of biological activity were maintained for about a week by the fungus Neurospora when it was intentionally isolated from all geophysical timing cues while orbiting in a space shuttle. The continuation of biological rhythms in an organism without external cues attests to its having an internal clock.
    When crayfish are kept continuous in the dark, even for four to five months their compound eyes continue to adjust on a daily schedule for daytime and nighttime vision. Horseshoe crabs kept in the dark continuously for a year were found to maintain a persistent rhythm of brain activity that similarly adapts their eyes on a daily schedule for bright or for weak light. Like almost all daily cycles of animals deprived of environmental cues, those measured for the horseshoe crabs in these conditions were not exactly 24 hours. Such a rhythm whose period is approximately—but not exactly—a day is called circadian. For different individual horseshoe crabs, the circadian period ranged from 22. 2 to 25. 5 hours. A particular animal typically maintains its own characteristic cycle duration with great precision for many days. Indeed, stability of the biological clock’s period is one of its major features, even when the organism’s environment is subjected to considerable changes in factors, such as temperature, that would be expected to affect biological activity strongly. Further evidence for persistent internal rhythms appears when the usual external cycles are shifted—either experimentally or by rapid east-west travel over great distances. Typically, the animal’s daily internally generated cycle of activity continues without change. As a result, its activities are shifted relative to the external cycle of the new environment. The disorienting effects of this mismatch between external time cues and internal schedules may persist, like our jet lag, for several days or weeks until certain cues such as the daylight/darkness cycle reset the organism’s clock to synchronize with the daily rhythm of the new environment.
The experiment on the fungus Neurospora is mentioned to illustrate________.
选项 A、the existence of weekly periods of activity as well as daily ones
B、the finding of evidence that organisms have internal clocks
C、the effect of space on the internal clocks of organisms
D、the isolation of one part of an organism’s cycle for study
答案B
解析 事实细节题。根据fungus Neurospora可定位到第一段倒数第二句。该段倒数第三句讲到，通过将生物与外界的周期性现象完全隔离，生物学家们发现生物的确有内部生物钟。然后以脉孢菌(fungus Neurospora)为例进行说明，文中提及脉孢菌的实验是为了证明内部生物钟的存在，故答案为B项。实验中没有进行每周和每天的记录，没有进行不同空间的对照研究，没有提及生物体独立部分的研究，故排除其他三项。
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