For anyone seeing this for a second time, I realised I uploaded the wrong version which had some washed out colours, poor resolution, and odd sound! This one is better :)

Ironically, giving prey more ways to defend themselves would’ve limited the growth (in size)of the predators making the point where they’re to big to sustain themselves taking much longer which is ironically beneficial to predators

Hey ! I'm doing a PhD in evolutionnary ecology and this is a really cool video ! What you observed at the end of the video with carnivores (predators) replacing herbivores (preys) is very common in population dynamics, although not as drastic as what happened in your case. The Lotka-Volterra equations are a pretty famous way to explain and model what happens, I recommand you to check it out and what's been done around it !

Is there a mechanic to this that let's the environment slowly change? like temperature making more ice and desert climate, that would be interesting to see how things adapt.

This is pretty cool, and it makes sense when you view it as the very beginning of evolution. Like a pendulum, it swings between states based on what is advantageous at the time. This changed the way I viewed evolution. Pretty cool stuff!

Thought this video came from some of those well known KZfaq channels about evolution and coding. But no, just a currently underrated KZfaq channel which so happens to have an interesting well put video. This video really needs more attention.

One interesting feature I think you could add would be to add a variable for how "Migratory" a species is. Basically, a chance for it to move, even though it has available resources. In a larger map, this could potenially give prey some defense against predators, at the cost of potentially moving to a location that's worse off resource wise.

Your mutations are really well done. I might recommend focusing on the four F’s : (Fight, Flight, the other 2 you have). Size and speed models don’t really capture all of the physical traits anyhow (camouflage, intimidation, communication, … there’s so much) I like how you chose hexagons instead of squares (it’s hard math, but more fun)

The effect you've got when you got a lot of herbivores, and then they were replaced by carnivores and vice versa is probably the same as "population waves", it's a pretty easy, but interesting concept. So yeah, they probably would repeatedly replace each other, just like it happens with hunters and prey in real life!

this is video quality i dont see in channels with like 50k subs this is factually accurate informative entertaining statistical give this man some compensation for his unthinkable work

This is a great video! Keep up the amazing work!

Very interesting! I am intrigued to see your simulator and channel evolve. This is also some superb video quality.

4:12 Correct me if I'm wrong, but based off of what I've learned in biology, energy that's passed up the food chain gets less and less, making it so that carnivores, especially ones higher on the food chain, have to eat more.

This is so awesome! So exciting and inspiring to see people just out here doing awesome things just for so :D

Very entertaining video! Good luck on your future KZfaq endeavors.

I just randomly got reccomended this channel, but i love your handle. Just some bears in a trenchcoat!

Amazing work! I thought that omnivores would thrive due to being able to get food more easily, I was right for a bit lol

Man this is cool good job man

"bees are smart" me 10 seconds later (not a joke) watch a bee crash into my window and die.

5:22 "[...] an untapped population of defenseless walking meatbags." HK-47: "As a meatbag would say: 'I have a bad feeling about this.'"

I love this! Evolution simulations are awesome!

It would be interesting to see species evolve into aquatic or semi aquatic species if resources were limited on land

subscribed great work, you can see the quality of the video took a long time.

Fascinating and brilliant ❤ You succeeded where I failed so many times, Life simulations are a project that I worked on programming at least a few times and I’m super curious what program you created this in? Also, are you an art student? You definitely seem to have some really good knowledge of animation and programming.

When you add more animals, I'd buy this as a game. Heck, I'd love it more if those animals were dinosaurs

This is sick dude the production quality is insane

4:32 Another channel working with evolutionary simulations, the Bibites channel, had a similar phenomenon where it was much more advantageous to be a herbivore than a carnivore. He eventually figured out that the key block he was missing was digestion. Since plant matter in real life isn’t as energy dense as meat, there’s less profit in actually processing it and it takes longer. Maybe that’s what is happening here as well? It would be super interesting if that was the same case here!

The bears: "mmmmm plants" Also the bears: "hey uhhh what if we ate each other? " Bears one more time: "nahhhh plants too good"

Really interesting. The visuals help a lot. I'm excited to see more of this.

highly enjoyable and interesting thank you

thats crazy! isn't non-hardcoded predation almost impossible great work!

Okay sooo more Video for me?

Maybe add some form of social communication among herbivores, carnivores and omnivores respectively and see how that changes things? Like having some carnivores move in packs while others are loners and the like?

I really love ecosystems and such. I even have two jars with small ecosystems in them at home, looking forward to see more

Amazing video dude!

give the predators the ability to understand to not mess with much bigger creatures, the ability of fleeing and escape for smaller creatures and the ability to choose help others for herbivores (only if they re big enough and rarely anyway)

Great video, great simulation! If I understood it right, you have a set of fixed traits that can be present in greater or lesser amount which changes with mutations. I know that one important facet of organism phenotypes is that immune systems and protection against prey are extremely important. They evolve the most rapidly of any of the traits of any organism. And I don't think you had a trait or traits that represented the ability to defend against predation. I'm sure you're gonna be adding that and I'll be watching your subsequent videos.

This is amazing. Would love to see some new variables like: - age of maturity (could be earlier if enough food and later if they're struggling to build energy) - reproductive age (could lose virility over time) - lifespan (obvious) - socialising (how willing/eager to mate) Can't wait to see where you take it

This is amazing thank you so much also it’s really cool listening to your commentary and I hope you keep it up - sincerely teen aspiring to become a zoologist/ecologist

Whoa, I love evolution simulations, made one myself but it was bad 😂. Yours extremly good though :3

This is cool ive seen some evolution videos but this is the coolest!

My problem with experiments like this is that it's so limited and closed. You have a preset list of statistics that definite the creatures and they can only mutate within those preset parameters. There was an experiment in the early 80s by Thomas Ray that really showed what digital evolution could do. There was a Virtual Machine called Tierra. Programs would run inside it and Tierra had two important points, when a program was running, every so often a bit would get flipped, 1 to 0 or 0 to 1. The other was that it would track how long each program was running and delete it when reached a certain age. Ray set one program running in it called 80 (so called because it was 80 bytes long) which simply copied itself into a new memory location. Most of the copies that mutated simply stopped functioning, and occasionally he would get a 79 or 81. But eventually he got a 45! On examining a 45 he found that what it was doing was using the code of an 80 to reproduce itself, like a parasite. So 45s and 80s needed to be in balance, but apparently 79s were immune and could breed without that limitation. Eventually a 22 showed up that was not a parasite. A functional, self contained program that was almost a quarter as small as Ray was able to make (smaller programs take less time to run so can reproduce faster). Eventually other types of programs evolved like groups that passed the pointer around to each other do they would all have more opportunities to copy themselves. Parasites evolved in these groups that once they received the pointer, didn't pass it back. He tried turning off the mutation and he STILL got evolution, from two programs trying to copy themselves into the same location at the same time. So many traits and tactics evolved that Ray never could have imagined and didn't build into the program at the outset. The one disadvantage is that it doesn't give you a landscape-like graphic that is immediately understandable by the average layman.

Great presentation and topic. You've earned yourself a subscriber!

bro your voice is so good, you could commentate grass growing and i'd still watch it

Awesome Creation and Video, I’d say your qualified enough by the looks of it 👌

wow this is nice and motivative, what was the environment made with? python or a separate tool?

This type of channel makes me instantly subscribe

I am interested in the coding part of it is there a git repository you have shared, and which algorithm you have used like NEAT module, or any reinforcement learning techniques?

would be cool in my opinion if herbivores could kill or drive away each other when trying to compete for the same tile. Size should not guarantee win in a fight but it should give better odds for it. perhaps there should also be a stat that determines the size of potential competition that a creature would flee from.

Hey just an idea what if you code it so they can migrate into groups and have colonies, wars and international races like the Olympic Games and what if you made it so they can evolve to go to other planets and moons? Anyways great video

One thing that would interesting to track in future experiments would be the the herbivore population and speed that plant food respawns. Theoretically, the faster the plant food respawns, the less effective carnivores are by comparison. This video inspired me, I would love to try to do something similar

This pattern remind me of the role lemmings play in their ecosystem. Several predators rely almost exclusively on lemmings to breed and rear offing during the spring and summer months. Lemming populations will grow exponentially until they crash, only for the population to recover and the cycle to recover. When the lemming population has crashed, predators such as the Arctic Fox will often struggle to find enough food to rear their offspring that year and few if any young will survive from that season.

Awesome video! The algorithm spat something good at me for once 😊

This is amazing but in a future video maybe make so the type of plant evolve and change to because just like animals plants change over time too like amount of food produce or grow time

It's so cool that the habitat affects the evolution greatly mostly at first the predator evolved in harsher environment and less green but after moving to the green tiles they evolve into omnivores and slowly to herbivores us the population grow and the competition of food greatly expanded they evolve to omnivores and it repeated again , sadly you can't see more in the carnivore because of the environment they don't really need to evolve on that path.

This is so cool

i wonder how a much bigger map would effect it?

A theory I have for epoch 2 is it looks like majority of the terrain supports plant food meaning that by rule of natural selection herbivores would dominate as shown and maybe I missed something but If carnivores and herbivores can't mate in the simulation it would lead to a lack of ability to reproduce for the carnivores due to limited numbers spread too thin and lead to them eventually dying off.

i would be very interested to see what is different if the map size is massive like 3000+ tiles and an almost equal part of every biome and liike 2 or 3 pawns in each biome to start

You’re not just some guy on the internet you’re the guy on the internet who’s video the viewer clicked on lending you credence

what program are you using? it looks really good

@EightLittleBears -- Does the simulation account for creatures with a genetic predisposition to grow large starting out their life small? If not, you might want to add that factor, perhaps along with some sort of growth speed Factor, which of course would also affect how much food they would likely require, and be affected by how much food they actually eat. Also, if some species can begin reproducing before they've necessarily reached maximum size, then being a predator that can grow extremely large wouldn't necessarily mean inevitable Extinction.

I believe another food source should be added - high sugar/high carb plant matter like fruit, but is not easily available or all the time. Sugary fruits are one aspect of what enabled human brain growth to have its potential, sugar powers a big brain

awesome video, immediate subscribe!! i'm going for a degree in computer science and a minor in biology exactly for this reason, i want to simulate stuff like this too!

Almost 900 subs 🎉

I wonder if you let the simulation run for really long would we see lotka-volterra predator-prey cycles?

I would LOVE to see a world populated only with rabbits wearing vibrant mustaches. Subscribed!

is there the possibility of downloading this simulation somewhere? Edit: Just took a little look, seems like we'll have to wait, I'll definitely stick around

Hmm very interesting what was happening at the very end looked like it was about to swap, i'm excited for more long videos

Great video

yes, if the simulation continues, the species would enter an oscillating pattern, where there are die-offs and resurgences, till they can find a cyclical balance.

Super intrresting

Great vid

Okay first of all. That map is amazing. Bro it satisfies my brian. This could be a game man.

I would suggest creatures to move before tiles run out of food completely. It's unrealistic they would scour it that thoroughly, and a completely depleted tile is a strong barrier,v so this has the potential to change the simulation dramatically. How about a probabilistic motion where the more food is available, the more likely the creature is to stay?

I wish this was actually a game I learned a lot for AP bio

yeah, i know im late to the party but i was curiouse if you concidered that it may have been that the hurbavores may have depleated the food supply? just curiouse of your thoughts

excuse me, im new with this, how do you make those simulators?

Cool! This is very interesting tho 😊❤

your underrated man!

I feel like a point to make possibly is that it seems strange a herbivore and or carnivore just switching diets completely, in the sense that if you had cow which is strictly a herbivore and gave it meat as its only food supply it wouldnt just adapt to the new food source, it would die due to not being able to digest it.

It reminds me of a different life simulator that had a similar issue of predators being wiped out. The problem was that the prey evolved specifically to evade the predators until they died out or adapted into omnivorous scavengers. While that one didn't result in a later predator boom (probably due an initial amount of meat from the vast numbers of herbivores that died naturally) the solution to the problem there was to add a digestion mechanic that meant prey couldn't overly adapt without sabotaging their energy efficiency. If course it was a far different system, so you'll probably need a different solution.

They changed is so that any youtuber can do polls now! I hope this helps in some way.

The one thing I'm noticing and tilting my head at is how the vegetation in the plentiful biomes remains unchanged over the different generations? Wouldn't there be some areas that are over-consumed, thus diminishing the amount of plant life available in certain biomes? I would think that would create a more reasonable place for carnivores/omnivores. Since with less plants to consume, the mutation of consuming meat would be more necessary. Fascinating all the same.

I think herbivores dominated because the carnivores had no way of sustaining themselves at a larger size on a sparser diet of meat, whereas the herbivores could grow larger and remain in lush areas where food is plentiful. Had the carnivore had the ability to learn cooperation or develop more means of capturing prey, perhaps they would have been more successful.

really cool it kinda looks like niche

Great channel

Maybe adding a variable where vegetation density also changes

interesting to see that species:ALRE isnt the only evosim that experiences the herbivore bias phenomenon. Basically something in evosims ive seen is it takes a VERY long time for carnivores or even stable ominvore populations to develope. Something in the simulation causes a bias towards herbivory. My theory is that its the population size. If you could simulate something more akin to a continent than an island in scale, then you might have carnivory pop up more easily. Most evosims opperate in population sizes of hundreds, not thousands or hundreds of thousands. This puts them in similar scale of ecological complexity to small islands, which might only have a few hundred observable animals. Stuff like the innumerable dots in the pacific. Just like those islands, you rarely see macrocarnivores, just insectivores or maybe piscavores. So maybe if you increased the scale to be bigger, youd have more complex systems emerge

i thought you had 3.6 mil subs XD you should have more like 360k atleast

I’d love to see the same simulation but with plant/meat based diseases that decrease lifespan allowing for a possible fast evolving but non-immune, or slow lifespan, but immune.

What did you program this in?

i think its because the real world doesn't have invisible walls, and prey develops ways to evade predators, like hiding in the water, air, trees, and soil. I played Species ALRE, and what often ended up happening is the species that bred fast enough to max out the population cap either thrived through making it so no new babies could be born, or that some herbivores would become omnivores and eat the dead herbivores opportunistically, but occasionally become hyper lethal and kill everything, creating a cycle where the parent only lived long enough to reproduce, and then the child would eat the mother, and thats probably because the scale of time is summarized. Any time true carnivores that hunted appeared, they would eventually die because the herbivores that lived were the big strong ones and would one shot the carnos.

Any website of it?

Ideas: terrain speed effects shorten life spans 75% Increase map size Reduce initial population by 25%

It depends on how you programmed their diets to evolve over time. If your "Carnivore/Herbivore" is a single gene or slider and the animal essentially has to choose between herbivore and carnivore, it will always choose herbivore. The solution to this, if this is the issue, is to have meat-eating and plant-eating be two separate sliders, from 0-100 or however you do it. This way, an animal can evolve INTO carnivory without first having to lose its herbivory. This transition between herbivory to carnivory could be what is causing predators to be unable to evolve, because if they have to first drop their extremely successful herbivory just to get carnivory, they would never do that. If you allow them to evolve carnivory BECAUSE of their success by having it be a separate gene, it should happen more frequently. Realistically speaking, most animals on this planet are some level of omnivore. The only true carnivores are either cats, or basically anything arctic/oceanic due to the zero plants thing. Most other animals are omnivores, with some level of preference. Plus it's important to note just HOW MUCH BETTER meat as a diet is over plants. Meat does so much more for the animals that can digest it than plants do for the animals that can digest those, including healthier bodies, increased healing rate, more dense muscle mass, so SO much more energy per bite of food, carnivores are also generally able to be smarter due to the higher energy intake, and in general can make an animal that eats meat last so much longer lifespan wise. Plus they don't have to eat very often as you said. Gators can go like a year without food. We humans are only omnivores and we can go like a full month without food after having eaten a hearty meat meal. And finally, the big one that requires entire simulation changes: Certain types of creatures will just naturally need a specifically sized plot of land to be able to work as a population, otherwise the "population fluctuations" mentioned elsewhere will end up destroying themselves due to land not being expansive enough, and your simulation zone is pretty physically small.

Can you add neural nets for their brains. And they should evolve too.

Yeah, looks like with ample plant food sources there is no strong pressure to flip to a carnivorous diet for most of the run. Eventually the herbivorous population hit a limit of the food supply and that provided conditions that favored predation. With the simulation limited to size as defensive/offensive trait, there was a very strong pressure for everything to get big, but herbivorous hit a dietary wall from being to large driving the population crash and 'reset' to a stable state. It's very impressive the simulation population didn't go into a terminal decline when it crashed.

Quite an interesting simulation but it is limited by the size of the simulation and the detail. A larger simulation would likely help prevent a complete predator extinction as well as turning down the rate of mutation. The other thing would be changing the success rate of predation, predators in real life have shockingly low success in hunting which helps prevent them driving their food to complete extinction, which ironically helps them stop driving themselves into extinction. The main thing I noticed was body size, which normally has drawbacks depending on the ambient temperature of their environment.

Make this a video game or if it is how can i play it