This workshop is designed for instructors and lab coordinators who are looking for an adaptable outdoor
simulation that lets non-major students see firsthand key concepts related to natural selection. The workshop
also demonstrates our local strategy for designing labs so the labs are more flexible and easily extended. In the
core activity, students play the role of ?whatsits,? solitary, territorial animals living on coastal islands. Working
in pairs, students feed all winter on a limited food supply inside a 4 x 4-meter square ?territory.? In Exercise 1,
students practice foraging. There is sufficient food in their territory to survive, but students must find it in a
limited time, or they starve and ?die.? As winter progresses, they gain foraging skills but food gets harder to
find. Whatsits that survive are more likely to mate and rear offspring, so are more fit. In Exercise 2, students see
how selection acts on pre-existing variation. They forage for new foods using plastic knives, forks, or spoons as
?mouthparts.? Students try to predict which mouthparts will be most effective, but often the outcome of the
simulation conflicts with their predictions; why they do not match is part of the debriefing questions. In Exercise
3, students use the predominant mouthpart type from Exercise 2. For this simulation they have emigrated to 2
new islands, each with entirely new foods available. Whatsits forage for food again, and one population usually
takes longer to find sufficient food, and so is less reproductively successful. The simulations provide data for
exploring a range of follow-up topics. The notes for Instructors describe how we organized the basic modules so
they can be revised to introduce other evolutionary concepts and data analysis methods.
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