Bird Beak Lab

My first hypothesis was that if individuals with traits that help them survive better reproduce more, then there will be more of these individuals. The tweezers beak, the helpful trait, had 2-4 more chicks than the other types of beaks. This shows that individuals with better traits leave more offspring. 

My second hypothesis was "if better traits become more common over generations, then the organisms in the future generations will have more of these traits." In future generations, there are more tweezer-beaked birds because of how many more offspring birds with that trait have. This shows that populations begin to look more like the "winners."

For the second part of the lab, a new situation was introduced. We only had ten seconds instead of sixty to get food. We were asked "if natural selection occurs in a population, how do changes in selective pressures affect the evolution of that species?" My hypothesis was that if natural selection occurs in a population and tweezers did so well before, then tweezers will slowly become more dominant as other populations decrease even more. 

A possible error could be that we did not stop picking up food at exactly ten seconds. This could potentially cause certain birds to obtain more food and therefore more offspring that they actually would. To minimize this, people manning the beaks should be more attentive and fast to the end of ten seconds signal.

Another possible error could be desire to continue. One of my group members stopped trying, then started to try harder again a few trails later. This throws off the population and food obtained, going down then skyrocketing upward. To minimize this, group members should have enough respect for the lab to try continuously throughout the lab.

This lab was done to demonstrate a realistic model of natural selection. From this lab I learned that species that have traits better suited to their environment have more offspring, which helps me understand the concept of natural selection. Based on the information gained with this lab, I can see now that humans can greatly effect populations because of the new situations and environments that we can put them into.

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