Essay on Natural Selection and Beak Size

Submitted By alayna06
Words: 374
Pages: 2

Evolution lab
Angela Brooks
Bio/101
August 12, 2013

Introduction
In this experiment I studied many parts of evolution by studying small populations of finches (a seed eating songbird that typically has a stout bill and colorful plumage) on Darwin and Wallace Island. I also followed their changes over the next 100 years. Changes included beak size, population numbers, heritability, clutch size, etc. Evolution is all about change. For me to completely understand how evolution works I needed to see it in action.
Materials
In this experiment, I used an Evolution lab. The Evolution lab is an online natural selection stimulation. The lab is based on a model for the evolution of many trait characteristics of a person or species that are contained by huge numbers of genes. These many traits are studied by observing the precise sharing of the trait in populations and investigating how things changes from one generation to the next.
Methods and Procedures
I controlled numerous biological parameters; initial beak size, Heritability, Clutch size, Island size, Population, Precipitation, and Variance of the system, and looked at the changes in the distributions of beak size and population numbers over a hundred years.
The finches on Darwin and Wallace Island feed on seeds produced by plants growing on these islands. On these islands there are three different kinds of seeds: soft seeds that does well under wet conditions; seeds that are intermediate in hardness, made by