Jelly Bears Battle Disasters to Survive the Year 13 Evolution Game

Jelly bears braved the selection pressures to survive the evolution game, or be eaten – by Year 13 biologists!

Year 13 biologists enjoyed reinforcing their understanding of evolution using jelly bears and tracking their survival on ‘Bear Island’. Each team had different coloured bears representing polymorphism and placed them at different parts of ‘Bear Island’. Slowly, as different environmental changes occurred, e.g. ‘all bears on the Muddy Marshes are sucked down by quicksand and die’, they either survive and reproduce or die. This was a great activity to visualise how populations can vary over time including the bottleneck effect and genetic drift. So what happens to all the ‘dead’ jelly bears?……

This resource can be found at OCR examinations: https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/163772-bear-island-the-jelly-bear-evolution-game.pdf