Background Information: My research was conducted to explain how populations evolve by means of natural selection. In 1859, an English naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin first suggested an explanation for how evolution occurs, a process he called natural selection. Natural selection can be defined as the differential survival and reproduction of individuals with different phenotypes resulting from interactions with the environment. Evolution is the process by which different kinds or organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of earth.
Purpose: My experiment was about how snail thickness and color evolve by natural selection.
Prediction: If populations evolve by natural selection, than there are at least three conditions for snail shell thickness to evolve by natural selection 1) Individuals within a population vary, 2) Some of that variation is genetic, and 3) Reproduction is not random with respect to traits that vary.
Materials and Methods: The material I used was a CD-ROM named EvoBeaker Labs and clicked on Darwinian Snails. The methods I used were a histogram of snails on a coastline by shell thickness and numbers of snails in each category. The objective is become a European green crab that is very hungry. Your job is to eat the snails on the coastline by cracking their shells with your claw. You have to start the model running by clicking the go button in the control panel. The snails will start to crawl around, find the snail you want to eat and start clicking on it. Eat what’s inside and the snail will disappear. There are 50 snails and it takes 25 snails to fill you up. The remaining snails will reproduce. Each of the surviving snails makes two new snails by cloning, and then they die. The shell thickness will remain the same as the single parent.
Discussion: My prediction supported my hypothesis. Shell thickness will decrease as the crab eats them. The snail population won’t evolve toward shell thickness without no selection or no Inheritance. After snails are born they do not change their color or shell thickness. The only way this could be possible is Mutation’s Role which is allow some scientific part of DNA or genes to be modifiers, sometimes it’s useful or harmful like mutations in atomic bombings.
You May Also Find These Documents Helpful
-
Iris has been studying an invasive population of snails. This particular snail has no local predators, so the population grows wildly. She has observed that the population follows an exponential rate of growth for fifteen years.…
- 813 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
The overall goal of experiment four was to determine the identity of unknown cations presented to the student. But in order to know the identity of these unknowns, in part 1, Ag+, Pb+, and Hg22+ were presented to the student in aqueous solutions and then precipitated through experimentation. In part 2, the same procedure was enacted to determine which substances precipitated through qualitative analysis. Solubility rules were also a major theme as solubility is important in determining whether a reaction will produce a precipitate.…
- 708 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Natural Selection is the environments’ favoring of a particular trait in a population. Organisms use many different methods to adapt to their environments. In this experiment one must use brine shrimp and salt water solutions to represent organisms and their environments. Some organisms like the brine shrimp adapt to changes in their environments. Brine shrimp eggs produce cysts when their environmental conditions aren’t being cooperative. Brine shrimp eggs grow hard and brown when their environment does not have enough oxygen to support them. This also happens when there is too much salt content in their environment. When the eggs become hard and brown, they can be kept for long periods of time in a dry, oxygen- free environment. When the cyst is returned to its normal environment, it continues on with its development and eventually hatches. Brine shrimp are the perfect organisms to do experiments on because they only require a short time for development. The person conducting the experiment must use 5 beakers, each with different amounts of salt in them. The point of the experiment is to see how the brine shrimp eggs respond in each dish of salt concentrate. Once the salt and water have been combined, one must place approximately twenty brine shrimp on a microscope slide. After twenty four hours, some of the brine shrimp eggs should have hatched while some have partially hatched or not hatched yet. This must be done at the twenty four hour mark and the forty eight hour mark. The data should be written down on the chart given in the experiment papers. The hatching viability must be found by adding the number of hatched eggs at twenty four hours and the hatched eggs at forty eight hours and dividing it by the initial amount of eggs placed in the petri dish.…
- 339 Words
- 1 Page
Satisfactory Essays -
Set the “revisit in” drop-down menu to 300 years and then click the Run Experiment button. Click the Input Summary tab and note that in this experiment and note that all factors (both biological and ecological) were identical. Then click the Beak Size tab. Which of the following is true? (Keep in mind that the term “rate” refers to how fast, not how much. Also, we are looking for major differences, not minor ones due to random chance.)…
- 1548 Words
- 7 Pages
Good Essays -
The wildlife contained within the Everglades is very dependent on the cycling of this slow moving water. One example of this dependence is the feeding relationship between the snail kite and the apple snail. The snail kite is an endangered bird and the apple snail is a freshwater mollusk the size of a golf ball (Talley, 2003). The apple snails reproduce during the rainy season. The snails will lay thousands of tiny eggs on the stalks of marsh grasses when the water levels are at their highest. As the water recedes, the snail kites fly over the Everglades looking for them. Once the snail kite finds them, they swoop down and use their specialized beaks to extract the snails from their shells. The water cycle and the lives of apple snails and snail kites are intertwined. Snail kites depend on the successful reproduction of apple snails, which in turn is affected by the amount of rainfall. Recently scientists have been able to closely observe this relationship. When humans drained large areas of the Everglades and converted them into agricultural lands, the population of apple snails decreased sharply. This had a dramatic effect on the snail kite population. In 2003, only 1600 snail kites remained in Florida, the bird 's only U.S. habitat (Talley, 2003). The relationship among humans, snail kites, and apple snails illustrates the…
- 1854 Words
- 8 Pages
Better Essays -
As the graphs and photos in the illustration (reprinted from Seeley, 1986) show, the snail population on Appledore Island in the early 1980s was, indeed, dramatically different from the snail population that was there in 1871. The snails had, on average, shells that were thicker than those of their ancestors. The 1980s population also showed a somewhat smaller range of variation in shell thickness. The flat periwinkles living on Appledore in the early 1980s were descendants of the snails that were living there in 1871. Therefore, we can describe the change in the population as descent with modification, or evolution.…
- 5934 Words
- 24 Pages
Powerful Essays -
3. The theory of natural selection states that different members of a certain species are…
- 274 Words
- 2 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
Evolution by natural selection: This theory came about as a result of Charles Darwin trying to find an explanation for “why there are so many different living beings on earth?” (Pruitt, N. L., & Underwood, L. S. (2006). His theory contains two parts, the first part states that species change over generations. The second part states that what causes this change is natural selection.…
- 426 Words
- 2 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
11. What is biological evolution by natural selection, and how can it account for the current diversity of organisms on the earth?…
- 364 Words
- 2 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
3 Watch each part of the experimental demonstration and make preditions about wht will happen in each scenario . Record your preditions and observations in the Data an Observations section of your labatory report format.…
- 738 Words
- 3 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
As a result of natural selection, a population—a group of individuals of the same species living in the same place at the same time—can change over generations. Natural selection leads to evolutionary adaptation, a population’s increase in the frequency of traits suited to the environment (Simon, Reece, Dickey, 2010).…
- 1065 Words
- 5 Pages
Powerful Essays -
In the article “How Boys Become Men”, written by John Katz, he analyzes situations he experienced while growing up. Katz believes that boys become men by not showing fear or feelings and not ratting on others. As in the novel, The Other Wes Moore, both Weses are forced to become men at an early age. They experience events that push them to make decisions that make them grow and think like men do. Katz details the maturation process for boys, as the book, The Other Wes Moore, does with both Weses. They make decisions and take actions to mature and become a men.…
- 694 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Natural selection describes how the evolution of a species is determined by the traits they develop to survive. Because a species develops specific traits the structural formation of…
- 1589 Words
- 7 Pages
Better Essays -
Natural selection is a mechanism for the evolution of a population to become better adapted to their local environment over many generations. As we explore how natural selection works, pay attention some of its main principles: variation, overpopulation, adaptation, and descent with modifications.…
- 726 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Since the natural resources are usually limited, the reproduction results to competition for survival by utilizing the scarcely available resources. Species of organisms that posses traits that give them advantage over the others, they usually survive and pass the traits to the next generation unless the others organisms lacking the traits which do not survive the competition. Thus the process of natural selection is determined by the organism’s evolutionary fitness which shows the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce and determines the amount of genetic traits to be passed to the next…
- 630 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays