Showing posts with label Butterfly Lab. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Butterfly Lab. Show all posts
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Natural Selection with Butterflies
One of the first labs I do with AP Bio in our Natural Selection unit, is this butterfly lab from Kim Foglia. I just converted her lab to a google doc and also have a google sheet linked to it where my students record their data. I like for them to be able to see everyone's data and to be able to compare.
The first year I did this lab, I collected some squares of cardboard and glued different fabrics on each. I think all but one of the fabrics were fat quarters. Then I used a standard hole punch to punch out 5 different colors of "butterflies." It was a little painful punching that many holes the first year, but I've gotten several years of use out of them since, so I guess it was worth it. For each of the fabrics, there is at least one color of "butterfly" that blends in incredibly well. Each environment will see a shift in the frequencies of different colors of butterflies, but it'll be different color shifts.
The students have enjoyed it each time we've done this lab and it gives a good picture of what is going on with natural selection.
Here is the link to the lab as a google doc. And here is the link to the google sheet I made for data collection. There are also links to this in the lab itself. Generally, I only print the last 4 pages of the lab for students and have them access the first three pages electronically through Google Classroom.
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