Hunger Games Lab

          What we did in this lab was hunt for food using special phenotypes. The three phenotypes were stumpys (wrists), knucklers (knuckles), and pinchers (index finger and thumb). The phenotype that was the best at capturing food were the pinchers because they had the ability to capture food with two hands and had a better grip on the food by using their index fingers and thumbs. The population did evolve. I know because the allele frequency changed over the generations. The frequency for the "a" allele grew from 0.52 of the total population to 0.82 of the total population. The frequency of the "A" allele shrunk from 0.48 of the total population to 0.18 of the total population. Also on the graph, the function of the "a" allele grows over time, where as the function for the "A" allele decreases over that same time.

          Some events in this lab were random and some were not. Some instances of random events were the random clumps or spread out food and how the organisms reacted to those events. Some instances of non-random events were that pinchers used their index and thumb, knucklers used their knuckles, and stumpys used their wrists. This is similar in nature because random events such as floods or storms happen all the time and they affect the populations of organisms. I think that the results would have been the same if there was not incomplete dominance because the pinchers would eventually outcompete the stumpys and the pinchers would become the dominant phenotype, just like how it happened when there was incomplete dominance.
          The relationship between natural selection and evolution is that natural selection favors the traits that are advantageous to survival, making it so that the individuals without that trait die off. That changes the allele frequency, which is evolution. Some strategies that people developed in order to increase their chance of survival and reproduction were grouping up, helping each other, and competitiveness. This would have affected the allele frequency of the population by giving an advantage to those who used the strategies to help their chances at survival. This happens in nature too, where many species of animals group up together in a herd to help obtain food and protect themselves.
          In evolution, the populations evolve, not the individuals because they are stuck with the genes that their parents gave them. Natural selection acts on the phenotype, but affects the genotype because the phenotypes of the individuals who have an advantage pass on the genotype that makes that phenotype, so the overall population's genotype will eventually have more and more of that genotype and phenotype. Some questions that I still have are that how did all of this start and where did it start?

Forgetfulness Project Post 2

          The 20 time project that I am doing is about forgetfulness and how and why it happens, as shown on my previous blog post Forgetfulness Project Post 1. This post is a 2 week status update on how my project is going so far, which I think is going well so far. What I have done is researched information on how forgetting works and why it happens. How it works is that in short-term memory the brain can only keep around 5-9 items in its mind at a time, so it discards information that are not being used, which is also why it happens. Also, I have researched about experiments to do to test memory and forgetfulness. The experiments that I am leaning towards are short-term memory test because they are more simple to conduct and easier to gather more information about how the brain forgets, which I can then figure out why it happens.
          What I have learned about myself is that I forget a lot, whether it comes to school, activities, and work in general. Also, I forget many things that were in my short-term memory, such as my parents yelling at me to take out the trash. I have also learned about my time management skills and how they are affecting my work on this project and work. My time has been managed just enough to provide enough information and research on this topic in order to go ahead onto the next step of this project which is the making of the experiment.
          Some setbacks were my time management, the complexity of the information, and the many choices I have to make an experiment. The time management is affecting me by just allowing me to get the right amount of research into this project. Most of the experiments that I am finding in my research deal with long-term memory with many components that would take almost years to conduct, which I don't have. Also, the variety of experiments on short-term memory is great, which makes it hard to choose only one. Each experiment tests different parts of memory and forgetting, and I want an experiment that encompasses a big section of each part to conduct to make my experiment more efficient easier to quantify, and to keep track of. How I can apply this knowledge to myself, my school, and my community is by sharing my findings on this blog and raising the knowledge of people about a process that happens almost constantly in their brains.

Unit 7 Reflection

          In this unit, we learned about ecology and how organisms interact with their environments. The themes and essential understandings of this unit were interdependence, homeostasis, and cause and effect. Interdependence is the concept that all organisms are dependent on each other. The way they are all dependent are that they are all connected through food chains and food webs. They all keep the environment in balance which is the key to a healthy ecosystem. Homeostasis is the concept that all organisms want to be stable. When populations of organisms are stable in an ecosystem, the food webs also stay stable, which leads to the ecosystem being healthy and balanced.


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          There are many things that I want to learn about that wasn't covered in this unit. For example, I want to learn more about the energy transfer between organisms in food webs and food pyramids. Also, I want to learn more about what we can do to save our dying ecosystems and how to balance the needs of humans and environments. My learning experience on working on the Conservation Biologist Project was good. I learned how to balance the workload between my group members and the Team Contract helped us do that very well. To me, I felt that the project was a big workload, but since we got a lot of time in class, it helped me manage my time better for other homework for other classes that I would have to do at home. What went well was the collaboration and cooperation of my teammates. Also that we finished the project on time. Nothing went wrong or not well at all, it was a very successful project. The collaboration between my group mates was very good and we all carried equal weight to make this project.


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          In class, I took this survey about what my dominant way method of conflict management is. According to that survey, I was assertive and aggressive, which meant that I was looking for ways for everyone to "win" and also ways for me to "win." My dominant method of conflict management was that I was assertive. Ways to be more assertive is to continue what I have been doing, which is being assertive.