Natural Selection Lab Report

Abstract Natural selection is investigated in this lab with the use of varying plastic phenotypes represented by spoons, forks, and knives to determine if natural selection will occur. Each phenotype went through five generations competing against each other for food to determine if they will survive and reproduce. We hypothesized the spoon phenotype would be the most suitable trait to obtain food, therefore being the adaptive trait through evolution. After the simulation, it was confirmed the spoon was the dominant phenotype suggesting natural selection and evolution did occur.

Introduction Natural selection is a major factor in determining which individuals survive and reproduce, often decided by limiting factors such as food, space, or

This change in portions of a population over time matches Charles Darwin's thoughts on evolution (Millstein 2021), which we aim to evaluate in our experiment. We intend on doing this study by using knives, forks, and spoons to represent plastic claws in an environment and having them compete against one another, having beans as their main resource. We hypothesize spoons will become the dominant trait over generations of natural selection due to it being the best trait to scoop as many beans as possible. Materials and Methods This experiment started with 3 groups, each representing the different phenotypes of plastica. One group was spoons, the second was knives, and the third was forks. Each group starts with only one member. This simulation went through five rounds which represented a different generation each round. With each round, the groups had four minutes to accumulate as many beans as possible. There were three beans in this experiment, each plastica could gain, each with different values. White

Based on the first set of data, only the knife and spoon phenotypes could reproduce after round one. This led to the fork phenotype dying out after the second generation as seen in both graphs. Which makes this phenotype the least fit for our environment? Even though the knife population reproduced, they could not compete with the spoon population. As seen in Table 1, the knife population increased from one to four, however slowly dropped in population as later generations appeared. Meanwhile, the spoon population increased from one to five after round one, reproducing the most of all phenotypes. In the following generations, the spoon population showed signs of eventually taking over the population due to taking up at the most 71.4% of the plastica population twice as seen in Table and Graph 2. The initial hypothesis that the spoon phenotype would take over through generations of natural selection was accepted due to the spoon phenotype taking over 50% of the population following round one and steadily growing, meanwhile other phenotypes slowly died out. Similar results appeared in another study regarding the evolution of phenotypes. The University of Michigan conducted an experiment evaluating tadpole phenotypes with and without predators