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Assignment 3
 

Assignment 3

Clutch size is the number of eggs that a female bird lays in her nest. In the EvolutionLab simulation model, birds mate for life and live for one year, and each female produces only one clutch of eggs per year. Working within EvolutionLab, set the clutch size to 6, the rainfall to 37 cm, and the initial beak size to 25 mm on both islands (keep everything else at the default values). Run this simulation for 300 years and repeat the run two or three times. Answer the questions below.
1 .       Did you notice anything odd? (If not, try again until you do).  



2 .       Propose a hypothesis to explain this result. Leaving the rainfall and beak sizes alone, what parameters would you change to prevent this? What parameter would you change to increase the likelihood of this happening?  



3 .       What type of selection is happening during the first several years of this experiment?  



4 .       If these birds were capable of assortative mating, what might happen on one island?  








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