Evolution Lab

Evolution Lab

Sherrie Hamby

BIO/101

January 18, 2012

James Marlowe

Evolution Lab

Evolution is a necessary stage and part of life. It's what has shaped and define all living organisms on this planet. Evolution has helped all population and organisms respond to change in their habitat. The way they have survived is by passing on certain traits that have worked on keeping them alive it is known as adaptation. I wanted to see what would happen if you changed the eating habits of finches. What effect this will have on the evolution of life on this island?

Materials

All of the materials that you will need for this experiment are: a computer, pencil, paper for notes, and access to the Evolution Lab on the student website for the University of Phoenix.

Introduction

First, I went to the student web site and used the Evolution Lab website for the University of Phoenix. What I wanted to do is run two different scenarios to determine how much effect food sources have on finches. The test has seven different variables that you can change and those are beak size, variance, heritability, clutch size, island size, population, and precipitation. The test is simulated on two different islands one is named Darwin's Island and the other is named Wallace's Island.

Experiments

The first experiment that I ran I chose to set my parameters for Darwin's and Wallace's island the same. The parameters are: initial beak size 12.0 mm, heritability 0.7, variance 1.0, clutch size 10.0 eggs, precipitation 20.0 cm, population 200.0 birds, and island size 0.5 km. This experiment was simulated over a hundred years. I chose to change beak size to 20.0 mm, precipitation to 14.0 cm, and island size to 1.0km. The second experiment that I ran I chose to set my parameters for Darwin's and Wallace's island the same. These are the parameters initial beak size 12.0 mm, heritability 0.7, variance 1.0, clutch size 10.0 eggs, precipitation 20.0 cm, population 200.0 birds, and island size 0.5 km. This experiment was simulated over a hundred years. I chose to change beak size to 20.0 mm, precipitation to 14.0 cm, and island size to 1.0km.

Data

When I ran the experiment the data that I received was very interesting. I changed the precipitation from 20.0 cm to 14.0 cm. Over the span of a hundred years their beaks grow on Darwin's island to 24.89 cm and on Walla's island they grow to 24.58 cm. On Darwin's island it seems that their beak sizes grow a cm every 15 to 20 years +/- 0.3. On Wallace's island the beak size grows on average of 1 cm every 15 years +/- 0.3.