Natural Selection Exercise Lab

Methods

The purpose of this lab was to run several simulations on a computer program showing the effects of Natural Selection by Evolution on a population of flat periwinkle snails with various sizes in shell thickness. In Exercise 1 of the simulation, the starting population of snails was 50. To begin the simulation, I was to act like a European green crab and select which snails from the population I wanted to eat by clicking on each snail. I was to eat snails until the population was at 25. Once I had eaten my meal, the crab was to go away for a while to allow the snails to reproduce in order to get the population back up to 50 snails. Once the crab came back, I then again selected 25 more crabs to eat from the population while managing to maintain my crab happiness score by eating snails with the fewest clicks …show more content…
After this, I selected STOP on the simulation and allowed the snails to reproduce again. The crab came back for one final meal of snails until the population size decreased to 25. After the crab’s third meal, the population of snails was to be reproduced yet again in order to finish off the simulation with 50 snails. In the second part of this exercise the population of snails was to be reset in order to have a new population. Three to five auto-munching crabs were added to the Rocky Coastline that automatically ate the snails. The simulation was to be ran until there were 25 snails left in the population. The population was to be reproduced to 50 and then the crabs ate another meal of 25 crabs. After the crabs had their second meal of snails, the population was reproduced again and the crabs had their final meal of 25 more snails and the population was reproduced yet again to finish the