Highway Cliff Swallows
Assessment
This formative assessment centers on a real-world case study of rapid microevolution: the morphological adaptation of highway cliff swallows. As these bird populations shifted their nesting behaviors from natural cliff faces to concrete road overpasses, they encountered a lethal new selective pressure: high-speed vehicle traffic. Over a 30-year span, biologists tracked the wing lengths of net-captured survivors against birds struck and killed by vehicles. In this assessment students will manipulate this standardized dataset to analyze and model the four factors of evolution. Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs): 1. Describe relationships between human-made environments and changes in behavior. 2. Use data representations to model distributions of physical traits within a population. 3. Construct an evidence-based explanation for how selective pressures drive evolutionary shifts in a population over multiple generations.
Cliff swallows are small, social birds. They build clusters of gourd-shaped mud nests in large breeding colonies. Historically, these mud nests were built on vertical cliff faces. However, over the last several decades, their behavior has changed. Thousands of swallows have shifted to building nests on highway bridges and overpasses. Biologists tracked individual birds within these highway colonies for nearly 30 years to see how these concrete structures impacted the swallows. In this assessment, you will analyze their data and explain the mechanisms of evolution at work. Click Next to get started!
Topics and standards: Life Science, Evolution, LS4.C, HS-LS4-2, LS4.B, Natural Selection, Constructing Explanations & Designing Solutions, Cause & Effect, Grades 9-12, 3D Science Tasks, Tuva Assessment Tasks, BIO1-LS4-2, Assessment, BIO.4.3, 3.1.9-12.T