Aug 152013
Students explore the effects of natural selection on populations with or without trait variation. Students play a game with nuts simulating crab-mussel interactions, gather data from the game, analyze it by making figures, and draw conclusions about how an introduced predator could cause quick evolutionary change in only a few generations of the prey species. Students answer questions about the three requirements for evolution by natural selection and discuss other examples of rapid evolution.
At the conclusion of the lesson, students will be able to:
- List the three requirements for evolution by natural selection
- Phenotypic variation in a trait
- Relationship between that trait and fitness
- The trait must be heritable
- Determine whether evolution happened in a given situation
Resources:
- Lesson plan (Word)
- Peanuts and almonds/pistachios (in the shell)
- Student worksheet (Word)
- Presentation (PDF)
- File to generate figures (Excel)
Lesson Plan created by GK-12 Fellows Emily Grman and Raffica La Rosa, 2008