Artificial ecosystem experiment: change the food supply

The question

What happens to an artificial population when food is added more often? Use BioSim to compare two food settings while leaving reproduction controls unchanged. Allow about fifteen minutes for several short observations.

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 freq is an interval measured in simulation ticks. A lower number adds food more often. At 100, food is added twice as often as at 200 in terms of simulation ticks. It does not guarantee twice as many surviving agents, and ticks are not seconds.

Keep both reproduction controls at 7 during this experiment. Changing several controls together makes it harder to understand which change produced the result.

Run a baseline

1. Set Food freq to 200 and both reproduction controls to 7.
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 freq to 100, leave the reproduction 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 encounters, inherited traits 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.