Predatory Prey

Predator Prey Lab

     The goal of this lab was to demonstrate the relationship between predatory and prey. In this graph you can see many things. The first is that there must be significantly more rabbits than wolves. This is due to the 90% of energy that is lost between each trophic level. Therefore, there must be 1/10 as many wolves as there are rabbits. You can also see here that when the prey overshoots the carrying capacity, its numbers will drop rapidly. This will also cause a the wolf population to drop because they have no food left. As you can see towards the right of the graph, the rabbit population will then once again increase, and the wolf population will follow. You can also see that it took about 3 generations for a wolf to survive because there were not enough rabbits to sustain one wolf. Once there were enough rabbits, the wolf population was able to grow.
     We had the snow terrain, so therefore more white rabbits survived than green or yellow. This is because the white rabbits have a mutation that allows them to blend into the snow. This is called survival of the fittest. As the green and yellow die off, only white will survive and reproduce. Over a long period of time this would lead to an all-white rabbit population. If rapid warming, however, were to occur, then the snow would melt and the rabbit population would quickly die off because they were evolved to their specific surroundings.