ABSTRACT:
In this experiment, our goal was to discover how different populations interact within a community, and how this interaction can influence the process of evolution in both species. The relationship between a predator (the students) and a prey species (beans representing the mice) was used as examples. Predators are carnivores, where they hunt and eat other animals in order to survive. However, mice have an advantage, hiding in small secure places because of their size (Kaplan, 1). The mice population without predators will increase and have a crash, but the mice population with predators will vary. For the experiment, with mice and predator together, we used beans to represent the mice and a spoon symbolizing other animals. For the…show more content… For the predator with mice population, we started with twenty beans that represented the mice and a spoon that represented the predators, which was ourselves. The task was to see how many beans the spoon would be able to sweep in thirty generations. We calculated the number of mice reproduction and the predator reproduction by sweeping the spoons through the bowl without looking and estimated how many beans the spoon can pick up. In order for the predators to survive, they must eat two or more mice to survive or else they will die. In order for the mice population to survive, each pair will have three offspring. We repeated this process for thirty generations and wrote our results in the appropriate column. For the experimental group, without predators, we calculated the mouse survival by dividing by two and multiplying the answer by three. Once we got the answer for that equation, we added it to the original mice population and if the final answer was over five hundred, there would be a population crash, also known as carrying capacity. When this happened, we took the previous answer from the previous generation and multiplied by five percent and repeated the steps again. We used similar steps in both the control and experimental