Hunger Games Lab

1. In this lab we experimented on how natural selection causes species to change and evolve over time. In this lab we stimulated a population of organisms trying to survive, which included Stumpys who could only pick up food with their wrists, Knucklers who could pick up food with their index and middle fingers, and Pinchers who picked up their food using their thumb and index finger. Using those three phenotypes for the organisms, we tried to figure out how natural selection works and if the population would evolve during our trials.

2. The phenotype that was the best at picking up food was Knucklers because you could easily pick up multiple food quickly.

3. In our population it did evolve, because in our data the population gradually became Knucklers and Stumpys decreased and at the end there was only one Stumpy in the population when there was originally ten. As shown in our graph there was an increase in the "A" allele frequency and a slight increase in the "a" allele frequency.

4. Most of the events in the lab were not-random like how where the food was placed and who each person wanted to mate with. The effects of the events caused the population to evolve because organisms like Stumpys would be able to get more food when there would be a pile of food in one area, compared to when food was equally distributed.

5. The results would have been different if the food size became smaller or larger because if the foods were bigger the Stumpys would've had an easier time to pick up food, and if the food was smaller the Pinchers and Knucklers would have an easier time. Some things that may occur in nature in how food may be too small for bigger animals to access and eat compared to smaller animals being more adapted to eating food that are smaller.

6. The results would have been different if there was incomplete dominance because then when two organisms with different phenotypes mate it would be a combination of both of the parents, compared to the lab where the offspring is either one of the parents or inherits a different phenotype that is a different combination than their parents.

7. The relationship between natural selection and evolution is that natural selection causes evolution when a species weeds out traits that wouldn't help them survive in their environment or when a species adapts to a different environment which would change how they would eat and others.

8. The strategies that individuals used and adopted in order to increase their chances of survival and reproduction were going to places with food where not a lot of people were and being more aggressive and faster when grabbing food. This would have affected the allele frequency in the population because if one species ended up surviving and reproducing more than the other species than the allele frequency for that species would raise and the others would decrease. In nature since there are limits to most things, individuals would have to compete to be able to mate with another individual and produce offspring and they would have to be able to easily access other resources in order to survive.

9. In evolution the thing that evolves are the species who are changing due to increase there chances to survive and produce offspring. I think that natural selection acts on both genotype and phenotype. For example if a bird with a big beak left one area and went to another where the food there was smaller and the bird couldn't easily pick up food, the bird would gradually have a smaller beak in order to survive better in it's environment. That would change both the bird's phenotype and genotype because the beak size changed and if the bird were to mate with another bird it would pass the big beak genotype to its offspring and not the smaller beak.

10. I don't have any questions about this subject.

Unit 7 Reflection

This unit was about ecology, which is the study of interactions between organisms and their environment. One topic that we learned about in the beginning of our unit was abiotic and biotic factors which are nonliving and living things, and the levels of organization which is organism, population, community, ecosystem, and biome/biosphere. Later we learned about food chains which show how organisms get their energy, and food webs which show how most organisms eat more than one thing and they are more accurate. Towards the end of the unit we learned about the factors that affects populations such as immigration and emigration, and that carrying capacity is the maximum population size that an environment can support. Next we learned about the nutrient cycles which include the water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycles which provide organisms things that are essential to life. Finally we learned about biodiversity, the total number of species in an ecosystems, which includes genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity. In our previous unit about bioethics, I made a blog post about Cloning Mammoths which has some things that are similar to this unit, like how because of the things that we want we are endangering other species. 

One thing that I would want to learn more about would be about how people figure out the carrying capacity for certain species. I think that when we had to do the Conservation Biology Project in class, my collaboration skills improved than when we had to do group work last semester. Some things that went well with my group was that we agreed on most things that we wanted on the presentation and we made sure that we finished everything on time so that we didn't have to do it for homework. One thing that didn't go well was editing the video, so we had to redo it because it had to just be one video instead of multiple ones. I learned more about what we had learned during this unit by researching about the area that we chose by adding things that we learned to it. I think that the collaboration was good in our group, because we managed our time well each period that we got to work in and we were able to agree and help out with others in our group.