Threespine Stickleback Lab Report

Discussion The threespine sticklebacks’ (Gasterosteus aculeatus) ability in evolving help them achieve the greatest amount of fitness and success for the future year. The group used the variable predation and calcium concentration to understand the stickleback better. Before measuring the group made a primary and secondary hypothesis. The primary hypothesis concluded that rainbow trout predation acts as selective source on the spine size of three spine stickleback because the different sizes of spines will indicate the difficulty of eating that particular stickleback. The secondary hypothesis concluded that the spine size in threespine stickleback is affected by the calcium limitation in the environment because the bones require calcium to grow and strengthen. While the group was measuring, they saw that the predation for the tout was longer than 8’ which helped measuring the calcium concentration because the calcium forms the bones in organisms. After doing the calculations, the group agreed that predation and spine size lacked correlation. In figure 1, the R2 of the predation was .1912. The group …show more content…
“They failed to detect a significant effect of dissolved calcium on morphological evolution” (Carl Smith 2014). Like Carl Smith and his team, the group also failed to recognize the effect of calcium concentration to the size of the spine in the threespine stickleback. When looking at the R2, it is understandable as to why the two do not correlate. The value is too low (.5057) for much correlation to take place however, more correlation took place between calcium limitation and spine size compare to predation and spine size. This causes the group to state that the hypothesis was accurate to a certain extent because in figure 2, one can see the support for the hypothesis between due to the points. “Threespine stickleback is reduction and loss of pelvic structure” (Bell et