Hunger Game Lab

Hunger Game Final Analysis

1. In this lab, we each became a different species of birds with different beaks. We fought over corks, our food, to survive and reproduce. We had to "eat" a specific amount of food to survive and when we reproduced with coins, the people who didn't survive the previous round came back in as offspring of the survivors. The lab stimulated a real world population of organisms trying to survive. 

2. The phenotype that was the best at capturing food was the pinchers because it was easier to pick things up with two fingers. 

3. The population evolved, and I know because the numbers changed a lot throughout the years. In the second year, the allele frequencies went far away from each other and favored the blue line, "A" over the green line, "a". The green line always stayed below 50% and the blue line always stayed about the 50% mark. They each had some highs and lows, but stayed in the same range after the first year. 

4. In this lab, the events that were random include any natural disasters such as the plastic year or where the food happened to be distributed. The events that were planned included who you mated with and some combinations that gaurenteed a certain type of offspring. The effect of evolution on this population almost killed all of the stumpys and the knucklers and pinchers survived. Most of the time, the knucklers would have a greater populations than the pinchers.

5. The results might have been different if the food was larger. It would be different because the stumpys would've had an easier time picking food up, the pinchers wouldn't care, and the knucklers would have a harder time. If the food source changed, certain birds with certain types of beaks may die out because they aren't able to pick up the new type of food.

6. I'm not sure. I know that stumpys would've been good at surviving purely because they have the dominant allele, but I don't know if their population would remain the same beccause they were reproducing as fast as they were dying, go down because even if they mated with pinchers, they're species would be more prone to surviving, or go down because their meathod of eating is so inefficant they dispite having a higher birthrate than those of pinchers, they die off quicker.

7. The relatioinship between natural selection and evolution is that natural selection causes evolution. Natural selection will weed out traits that are deemed unfit for survival in that enviroment and after many years of doing that, the evolution of a species will occur.

8. Some people cheated. This affected the allele frequency of the population because the pinchers and knucklers could easily become grabbers and those were the two populultaioins that mostly dominated. In nature, everyone in every species will do anything to get them an advantage over others of their species in order to survive and reproduce. It may be getting the safest spot to live, or hogging the food, whatever gives them an advantage.

9. In evolution, individulas evolve, which, in turn, causes poulations to evolve. Natural selection acts on genotypes because it may favor an indiviual with a particular genotype and it would have an easeir time surviving and reproducing, therefore adding its gene into the gene pool. It acts on phenotypes because the genotpes that change in a population will likely have an outward affect which is the phenotypes of an individual or a species.

10. I'm still curious about what we could change about our experiment to make it more realistic. I also wonder how many populations of species have changed into what we know them as now through natural selection and what they used to look like.