Artificial ecosystem experiment: change the food supply

The question

What happens to an artificial population when food grows more often? Use BioSim to compare two Food growth settings while leaving Births, Mutation and Speed unchanged.

Open the BioSim ecosystem simulator. Green agents are herbivores, red agents are carnivores, and blue agents have an intermediate diet. These are categories in this artificial model, not named animal species.

Understand the food control

Food growth is a 1–10 scale: higher values add food patches more often. It does not guarantee more surviving agents.

Keep both Births controls at 6, Mutation at 5, and Speed at 1× during this experiment. Changing several controls together makes it harder to understand which change produced the result.

Run a baseline

1. Set Food growth to 4/10, both Births controls to 6/10, and Mutation to 5/10.
2. Use Restart inside the BioSim controls to create a fresh population. Restart replaces the current world; export a scene first if you want to keep it.
3. Turn on the food view using Toggle food if food is hidden.
4. Observe for one minute with the tab visible. Note the total agent count and whether green, red or blue agents seem more common.
5. Pause to inspect the scene. Select an agent to see its genetic scan, including diet, age and health.

Compare a more frequent food supply

Set Food growth to 7/10, leave the other controls alone, and restart. Observe for the same duration on the same device. Write down the total count, visible food distribution and apparent mix of agent colors.

Repeat each setting at least three times. Restart generates a new world, so the trials will differ even with identical controls. Keep separate notes for each run rather than choosing only the most dramatic result.

Interpret what you see

More frequent food may help some agents survive or reproduce, but population changes also depend on local food, inherited traits, mutation and the initial world. A growing total does not establish that every diet group increased. The displayed total is not a separate count for each group.

If one group disappears, record that outcome and repeat. If the browser slows down, wall-clock comparisons become less reliable because fewer simulation steps may run. Use the experiment to form a hypothesis, not to predict a real ecosystem.

Keep a record

Use Export state to keep an interesting world for later inspection with Import state. Importing a state is not a promise of identical future events. In your notes, record the food interval, reproduction settings, duration, total count and a short description of the result.