Bird Beak Lab Conclusion

In this lab, we simulated different types of bird beaks with tweezers, binder clips, spoons, and scissors, and attempted to collect food, which we represented with rubber bands, toothpicks, paper clips, and macaroni, and the amount we collected determined how many offspring we had each year. The first simulation was normal, but then we had an environmental change to make collecting food different. Out environmental change was that we only had 10 seconds to collect food.
We verified that the individuals with the better traits would have more offspring. The tweezer beak was able to collect the most food, and therefore had the most offspring, 22 compared to 8 offspring from the spoon beak, 11 from the binder clip beak, and 15 from the scissor beak. This also verifies our second claim, which is that populations begin to look more like the "winners," or the most successful genotype. At the beginning, we were the only four birds, so tweezer beaked birds made up 25% of the population, or 1 out of 4. After several years, and several offspring, there were 22 out of 56 total offspring, making 39% of the population tweezer beaks, which is more than any other type of beak. This happened because the tweezer beak was able to collect food more effectively than the other beak phenotypes, so had the most offspring. The other birds had less offspring, so the tweezer beak made up more of the population.

After testing Darwin's conclusions, we asked what would happen if a disease affected the species. To simulate them having less energy, we reduced the time to collect food to 10 seconds. We found that with less time, all phenotypes produced less offspring, but tweezers and scissors produced the most. This is because the disease affected everyone equally, so all phenotypes collected less food.

While we tried to make this lab accurate, we did have some errors. We had different people collecting food with the different beaks at the same time. This means that someone may have been better at collecting food than someone else, making the data lean towards whoever was best at collecting, not necessarily what beak was best at collecting. We could have solved this by rotating beaks and having each person try out each beak. Another error we had was that the scissors were slightly magnetic. This made the collection of paper clips slightly easier, and some of the contact between the tweezers made them very slightly magnetic, but that made no difference because the attraction was so weak. This error could have been prevented by testing all metal "beaks" against each other to see if they were magnetic.

This lab was done to demonstrate how evolution can take place over a short period of time. From this lab I learned how Darwin's conclusions affect species with different phenotypes, which helps me understand the process of natural selection. Based on my experience from this lab, I could artificially select certain traits from a population to make a specific type of organism.