Predator-Prey Experiments

Living things are categorized by being either a prey animal or a predator animal. A prey animal is what a predator eats and the predator animal is what eats the prey. A stable predator-prey relationship would be when there are more sheep than wolves. This is stable because the predators, which are the wolves, will have enough prey animals to eat. An unstable predator-prey relationship would be if there were more wolves than sheep. This relationship is unstable because the predators will not have enough food to eat. The goal of this investigation was to test stable environments and see when they would go unstable. The guided question was “which factors affect the stability of a predator-prey population size relationships?” This supports the background information because it brings up the question of what will disrupt the stability of an environment.

The purpose of this simulation is to test the stability between grass, sheep, and wolves. The procedure used in this trial was to first check the grass to where the grass would not be unlimited. Second, set the grass regrowth time to thirty percent. Third, set the number of sheep to four and keep the wolves the same number as the default settings. The simulation ran for one hundred ticks. We used this procedure because we know that if the prey is less than the number of predators the relationship will be unstable. The data that was collected was the number of sheep, the number of wolves, and if the variables went extinct or not. The data was collected because they are the variables in the simulation. The data was analyzed by putting all of our observations into a graph. The data was analyzed this way because it is the most efficient