Again, the bigger the variety, the more interesting the results. Paperclips, jelly beans, marbles, lego blocks, or whatever else you have on hand will work. You can use toothpicks as stick insects, rice grains as ants, popcorn kernels or peanuts as seeds, mini marshmallows as plump juicy grubs. You can cut up rubber bands to make worms. For example, you can float styrofoam peanuts in a bowl of water to simulate water bugs. You will also use 6 simulated bird foods. You can use tongs, tweezers, chopsticks, a spoon, a skewer, a straw, a clothespin, or any other implements that resemble bird beaks. Setup: You will need 6 simulated bird beaks. (You would then need to keep the number of food items constant between trials. If you have to do it on your own, it will be less fun, but you can instead record the time it took for each bird to eat all of the food in that environment. Note: This simulation works best if you can do it with a group of people, so that the competition is "live" and you keep going until all the food is gone. Here are some videos that will give you the idea. No two environments are the same and, in our simulation, each one has a different primary food source: stick insects (toothpicks) in the vegetation, water bugs (floating styrofoam peanuts) in the "pond," seeds (popcorn kernels) in the field, worms (cut rubber bands) in the soil, etc. Each bird has a different beak type (spoonbill, tweezerbeak, tongbeak, etc.) and you will find that depending on the food available, some will do better than others in each environment. Introduction: How are bird beaks adapted to the foods they eat? In this lab, we will simulate a scramble competition (kind of like in the old kids' game, " Hungry, hungry hippos") between six species of birds in six different environments. Variation in beak size and shape in four finch species of the Galapagos islands.
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