La Cueva (57)

The La Cueva High School team (#57) is from Albuquerque. This year they've submitted a project titled Modeling of Predator-Prey Relationships.

Team Members

 * Dennis Huang
 * Robert McDaniels

Sponsoring Teacher

 * Samuel Smith

Proposal
http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/get_proposal1112.php?team_id=57

Animal adaptations are very important for species to survive and flourish. Adaptations occur because of some change or manipulation in their environment or surroundings. All sorts of variables can lead to the extinction of animals, but if we can figure out what variables can be manipulated, while still having the “self-healing” ability or adaptive ability, we could determine the optimal parameters for maintaining a healthy ecosystem. The goal of this project is to study AI models of both the predator and prey with the manipulation of the placement of food resources and animals and the mutation rate to determine the best parameters for a system using NetLogo.

Interim Report
http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/get_interim1112.php?team_id=57

Problem Definition
In nature, predator-prey relationships are enormously important to maintaining the balance of populations. Predators regulate the prey’s population, which tend to be large in numbers, and prey limit the predators when over predation reduces their numbers enough that the predators can no longer sustain population growth due to starvation. The goal of this project is to find the optimal environment for a predator-prey food chain where there is a perfect balance between the predator, prey, and food source. This kind of model can be applied to any situation in which an organism is killed in a predictable way, such as deforestation and poaching, and can be used to determine, as an example, what parameters to change to prevent extinction of an endangered animal.

Problem Solution
The simulation will use standard exponential growth models with an additional death rate, dP/dt=kP(1-P/K)-D, where dP/dt is the rate of population growth/decline, k is some constant, P is the population, K is the carrying capacity, and D is the death rate. The “constants” in this equation will be adjusted for each iteration based on the populations of each organism (plant, prey, and predator). To determine if the model has reached stability, the simulation will record the populations over time and stop when it has reached the median of population eight consecutive times.

Progress to Date
So far, a basic idea of how the model will be set up has been thought through and the basic structure of the Python program has been made.

Expected Results
After programming the model and iterating through the possible parameters for the system, a set of optimal parameters to sustain a healthy population can be determined. These can be used to determine how to save endangered animals, sustain a good economic “ecosystem”, and can be applied to anything in which two different entities are pitted against each other and cause the other’s success to be limited. Endangered animals are crucial to many environments around the world, and are often keystone species, meaning the ecosystem they live in becomes unstable without them. If applied to global markets, a simple model simulating a healthy economy could be established. This could be used to determine what “growth” and “death” rates can be used to sustain an ideal economy, and economic policies could be adjusted based off of these rates.

Introduction
Hi, My name is Dr. Thomas Robey See the biography on my User Page

Progress
Your project looks well thought out and has done some good basic research into the problem. Hopefully by now more progress has been made on the coding aspect and your project will have something to show at the Face to Face Evaluation.

The last sentence in the problem solution section mentions stability. What is stability with respect to a predator-prey model? If a model is not stable will it ever reach the median eight times? How are stability and "endangered animals" related? What factors are important (both in your model and the real world) for stability? Is it important to understand stability? Why?

Mentors
Do you have a mentor yet?

Model
One way of visually presenting predator-prey models is plotting both populations over time. Another way is to put the predator on the y-axis and the prey on the x-axis. This is called phase space. Are you going to plot your results in phase space? What information do you get from plotting the phase space of the model?

Face to Face Evaluation
Your next milestone is a face to face |face-to-face evaluation in February.

Rubrics
The judges will use these rubrics to evaluate your projects. Use them as checklists for what you need to communicate to the judges. Expo Judges Rubric

Comments from Team
Thank you very much for spending time to review this Supercomputing project.

In our problem solution, we mentioned stability and that means that the predator, prey, and food source are in perfect balance in which none of them will go extinct or overpopulate. Stability will lead the solution of endangered animals becoming further endangered. Factors that are important for stability include the death rate of all three parts, the birth rate of all three parts, and a few others. The factors such as natural disasters are unable to be included in our project due to nature's randomness and unpredictability.

Our sponsor teacher and parents are helping us.

We are still working on our code, so the final decisions have not been made towards presenting the data.

Again thank you very much.