Materials and Methods predator and prey - The green obvious...

Materials and Methods
The lab centered around three experiments, each of which tested an individual faucet of
the predator-prey relationship. The first of these tests was designed to determine the
effects of natural selection on camouflaged species of equal birth rates. A student was
used to represent the predator population and was tasked with gathering three colors of
beads, some harder to see than others. All colors had a starting population of 20 and
growth rate of 1.2 with each new generations’ population determined by the surviving
number multiplied by the growth rate. The predator was able to “capture” prey for
twenty seconds every generation. The second test observed the tradeoff between the
vulnerability to predation and the reproductive rate. This was achieved by using two
different color beads, one much harder to see than the other, and giving the less obvious
species a much lower reproductive rate.