Bird Beak Lab Conclusion

Hypothesis:

1. Individuals with better traits leave more offspring

The tweezers beak birds, whose beak was easy to control, and could easily grab food, had collected more food than the others, as a result, had more offspring. Because of the beak's ability, it dominated the competition, which resulted in more offspring for that type of bird.

2. Populations begin to look more like the winners

The tweezers beak birds were able to produce more offspring than the others. As a result, the others had fewer offspring than the tweezers beak due to the shortage of food, and the tweezers beak were more common in the population due to this.

In the lab, we were trying to discover "if natural selection occurs in a population, how do changes in selective pressures affect the evolution of that species?" The hypothesis that I wrote in response to this was "if there are changes in the environment, then other species have a chance to have more offspring, and dominate the competition". We found that the more drastic the change is in the environment, such as disease, or famine, the higher the chances of a new trait rising up to deal with the new environment, affecting the evolution of the species. This is most likely caused due to natural selection, where the most effective trait that is best in the current environment.

Some errors that I believe that might have happened would be placement of the food. Some of the food is either closer to the edge than in the middle of the table, or clumped together in piles. I believe this might have affected the advantage of a species to be dominant over others. Another would be the rounding system when counting the food. This system had often worked out more for those in need of offspring to continue the game. Overall, most mistakes could usually be shown as random changes that affect the competition, but a change to improve the experiment would be having people that can use their "beaks" properly can even out how the competition goes. Another change that I believe would help is having more types of food that some beaks cannot eat, so that there could be a sort of balance.

The purpose of doing this experiment is to explore natural selection, and how the species best suited in the current environment reproduces the most. This is a review of evolution in previous vodcasts, with a demonstration of natural selection, where nature decides the traits needed in the environment, compared to artificial selection, where humans manually select the traits they want from a species. This can be applied to everyday environments, where evolution is constantly changing species to adapt to the ever-changing, non-linear Earth. For example, wolves became dogs over many long years, since there were more benefits to being tame and kind to humans, than wild and hostile to them.