Hunger Games Lab

1. In this lab we simulated natural selection by having three prototypes: Stumpys, Knucklers, and Pinchers. Stumpys could pick up food with their wrists, Knucklers could pick up food with their knuckles, and Pinchers could pinch the food to pick it up. The Stumpys where homozyguous dominant, the Knucklers where heterozyguous, and the Pichers where homozyguous recessive. In each round the organisms would fight over corks which would be food. The organisms that got enough food to survive would reproduce and create another organism with a phenotype determined by each mating organism flipping a coin with their alleles on each side. Then we would repeat this process 8 times.
2. The Pincher phenotype was the most effective at capturing food because it could get the best grip on the corks.
3. The population evolved because over time more of the other phenotypes died out while the pincher phenotype survived and grew. This is known because over time the knuckler and stumpy populations decreased while the pincher population grew. This is shown in the data where the allele frequency goes from around 50-50 to about 75-25 and 75 being the "a" allele which makes up the picher's homozyguous genotype. 
   
4. This lab was in some ways random because the mating choices are random and also some of the less advantageous organisms could have still survived by being very aggressive.
5. If the food was smaller it would benefit the pincher phenotype even more, and if the food was larger it would benefit the knuckler and stumpy phenotypes more. Over time this would make the A allele more common and the a allele less common.
6. If there was not incomplete dominance this would cause there to be many more Stumpys because they had the dominant allele. However over time the Pinchers would start to take over the population, however they would have to only mate with other Pinchers to make the process faster.
7. Natural Selection causes evolution because natural selection will kill of the bad phenotypes and only the beneficial phenotypes would live to reproduce, this over time would cause there to be more of the phenotypes beneficial to survival to exist in a population. This is evolution.
8. The stumpy population after almost dieing out completely decided to work together and keep the population strong. This occurs in nature when organisms with less beneficial genotypes will work together in a herd.
9. In evolution a population evolves over time, not an individual organism. Natural selection most directly acts on phenotypes for survival. However the corrosponding genotype for the phenotype will be passed on to the offspring. And that offspring's chance of surving to reproduce will be determined by it's phenotype which is determined by the genotype it got from it's parent.
10. The one question that I still have would be why the populations of the different phenotypes first follow directional selection in the first half but then in the second half it seems to follow disruptive selection more?

Unit 7 Reflection

   This unit was about Ecology and how it effects us and how we effect ecology. In the Food Chain vodcast we learned how food chains and food webs transfer energy from organism to organism in an ecosystem. The ecosystem energy vodcast taught us how in energy pyramids the amount of calories in each tropic level decreases by 10 times as it gets higher. This is important because it shows how wasteful it is to eat animals on higher tropic levels. In the population ecology vodcast we learned how certain populations grow exponentially and others grow logistically when they get closer to the carrying capacity. The human population is growing at very high rates and is expected to reach carrying capacity soon.

   I want to learn more about ecology in the future and how plant and animal populations are dependent on each other in an ecosystem. I have no unanswered questions because the vodcasts explained everything I needed to know.
  The Conservation biology project went well and there was no problems with the collaboration. The one problem we did have was that while we where filming a series of things happened that unfortunately made the audio quality poor. Firstly, near the beginning there where some construction sounds, and halfway through the video one of the classroom doors nearby was opened creating more sound. These problems would have been avoidable if we could do another recording of the project, however I had to go to jazz band photos during tutorial so we couldn't work on it then. However the group collaboration was fine and I think our slides where great. In the self assessment we did at the end of the unit I got the most points in assertive which is good.