Natural Selection (10/16 - 10/20)

https://goo.gl/PdhSo1

Summary: 

          Natural selection is the process of elimination for traits in nature. Any negative trait for a species is discarded due to the fact that the species with that specific trait cannot maintain a long enough life to reproduce and allow their offspring to evolve. The traits that allow animals to thrive in their environment are kept and the animals with that trait continue to evolve. For example, there are a species of frogs. Due to mutation, the species is split into two traits; type A which has poisonous skin, and type B which has non-poisonous skin. Both types have a common predator. However, since type A is poisonous to predators, the predators can no longer eat that type. This focuses all the predator's' attention towards type B, the non-poisonous animal. Type B eventually goes extinct due to simply not being able to live long enough to reproduce while type A is allowed to reproduce, evolve and progress.

SP3: Planning/Carrying out Investigations: 

          This week I investigated, along with my table, how natural selection works. The first part of investigation was to have three different variants of predators. Due to the fact that live predators are rather dangerous in a school environment, we substituted them with a spoon, fork and a knife and for prey, we substituted them for an assortment of beans and buttons. In our table, each table mate had a utensil and for 20 seconds, we were allowed to scoop as many beans and buttons as we could. At the end of each hunting period, we had to count how much beans and buttons we collected and anyone that had a utensil that collected less than 20 beans collected had their utensil eliminated. By the end of four rounds, only the spoons remained. This is mainly because spoons were fit to survive in that environment. Forks had gaps in between each blade and knives are too thin to scoop things up. This activity/investigation helped me understand how natural selection works by discarding the negative traits and keeping the positive ones.