Which part of the living system did you change?
Labs / Biology
Predator & Prey
Grass grows, rabbits (dots) eat grass, foxes (orange) hunt rabbits. Nobody is in charge — every animal just wanders, eats, breeds, and starves by simple rules. The graph below the field tracks both populations. Click the field to release rabbits where you clicked.
Labs / Biology / Predator & Prey
Predator & Prey
Grass grows, rabbits (dots) eat grass, foxes (orange) hunt rabbits. Nobody is in charge — every animal just wanders, eats, breeds, and starves by simple rules. The graph below the field tracks both populations. Click the field to release rabbits where you clicked.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Living systems are connected and constantly changing. This model makes one biological process visible so you can test how its parts affect one another.
Explore
Try the model
Rabbits 180Foxes 10
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Just watch for a minute. Do the rabbit and fox lines rise and fall together, or does one lag the other? Why?
- Add a burst of foxes. What happens to the rabbits — and then what happens to the foxes?
- Turn grass regrowth down to a trickle. How many rabbits can the field support now?
- Try to make the foxes go extinct without touching them directly.
- After a crash, can the ecosystem recover on its own, or does it need a rescue from you?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Explain the process as a chain: a change happens, the system responds, and that response affects what happens next. Use an observation from the model as evidence.
Check
Before you leave
How did the system respond?
How would you explain that response?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.