Darwinian Snails Lab Report
In science, there are many factors that affect the possibilities that go into the reasons why evolution occurs and the concept that natural selection takes place. There are three thoughts that Darwin gave that determine whether or not a population will change; being, individuals within a species vary, some of those variations are heritable, and most offspring are produced that can survive and are non random. There is also mutation, which is genetic variation and is completely random or by chance. With that in mind, experimentations with snails and crabs showed that mutations of the snails’ shells only occurred in the presence of the crabs, as they were the predators.
Based on the thoughts of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin the snails that interacts with the crabs in the experiments are accurate and checks out. The first thought is that a population has to contain variation for some character. The snails do have variations between shell sizes and predator preference. Another thought is that variation is heritable. They create generations with the same and variations of their parents. Finally, there is the fact that some variants survive to reproduce at higher rates than others. That is also true because snails with the…show more content… As one looks at the setting without crabs you can easily see that the tank has no higher than a shell thickness of ten, which is classified as having a thinner shell. The shell thicknesses are far thinner than the tank with the infestation of crabs. The tank with the crabs has shells with thicknesses from eight to fourteen which is so much thicker than the tank with none who barely had any shell thickness over eight. This could be caused by reaction to the predator invasion which over time makes the shells thicker and the offspring when they reproduce more occurring and they take holds