Ecology Lab Hypothesis

urpose: The purpose is to determine the size of populations of owls and mice and their model interactions between populations.
Background: A prey is an animal that is hunted and ate by a predator. A predator is an animal that eats smaller animals. For example, a mouse is eaten by an owl; the mouse would be the prey and the owl would be the predator. Prey are based on the number of predators and predators are based on the number of prey; they both depend on one another’s population.
Hypothesis: If the owl population increases, then the mice population will decrease.
Materials & Procedure: Day 1:
1. Cut out the grid of squares that are each 1 cm on a side. Each sheet contains over 400 squares; you will need at least 200 squares, each of which

The mice are owls main food source. As the mice population increases and decreases so do the owl population. As the graph shows, it proves the mice increasing along with the owls. After the third generation, the mice start to decrease because the owls started increasing with the mice. Therefore, the mice and owls regulate off of one another’s population.
Error Analysis: While doing the mouse and owl population lab, many errors could have occurred. For example, counting the mice that the owls consumed wrong or the paper mice sticking to a person’s fingers that caused them to miscount.

Post-Lab Questions:
1.) The mouse population during the first few generations increased along with the owls increasing.
2.) After many more generations, the mouse population drastically decreased and the owls followed with the mice and decreased as well.
3.) The trends in the populations’ size of the mice and owls went along with one another. Both populations of each animal both increase and decrease at nearly the same rate.
4.) If there was an unlabeled graph of owl and mice population, people could easily tell which curve represented the owls and which represented the mice because mice reproduce faster. Therefore, there will always be more mice than