What will happen after 100h of evolution? Study of natural selection in an ecosystem simulator

Really hoping for some charts and graphs and maybe even a generation tree or family tree for them. Looking forward to getting sucked back into the simulation too. Watching these events make me want to play it more.

There are many evolution projects on YouTube, but the Bibites are by far my favorite. Their pixel art has so much charm and their complexity is unmatched elsewhere. Nice job!

This is where there is actually a lot of value in having genetic material that is “useless”. The useless parts of the genome are great for determining how (and when) they diverged. Because that DNA doesn’t have any function, it’s very unlikely to be similar as a result of convergent evolution, and much more likely a result of common ancestry.

You might have to separate the diet gene. I talked about it a bit on the last video. The fact of the matter is that it takes way too much time to "un evolve" plant digestion and transform it into meat digestion for carnivores to ever evolve. Instead of making them choose between plants or meats, just have an individual gene for each. This would make it possible for a bibite to have maximum efficiency in both plants AND meat, however you can balance this by making such a metabolism extremely costly in energy. I don't know exactly what else can be done to promote evolution to carnivore, but at the very least you shouldn't punish them for trying by having them lose their main food source entirely. I don't know if even this will help fix the predation problem, it's just a guess.

I think each bibite should be assigned with a random letter and number when they are born from nothing and each of their kid would have the same number. This would make it easier to track migrations and extinction events, as it would act like an ID to identify species with a common ancestor. In your own simulation, it would have been really useful to make sure that the inutilus truly migrated to other islands.

Maybe you can encourage predation by lowering plant calories even more and making meat and injured bibites "bleed" a pherhormone trail that allows carnivores to track them

The Bibite's ability to swallow food whole made me realize that the implementation of parasitism would be interesting. If a small digestion-resistant bibite gets eaten by a larger bibite, it could eat food inside the bibite, reproduce, then spread after the bibite dies. Just something I thought could be cool to add.

You are the first evolution project people I've seen actually release it to the public for people to play with it themselves Thats pretty cool of you

what i would love is a family tree to be added into the game so you can see how a species evolved it would make it some much more interesting in my opinion also great video i love what your doing

I absolutely love this series. The only issue with it is the wait between uploads is so long (which is understandable), I have to spend a minute attempting to remember what the last episode taught us! A lot of it is common sense though, so that isn't too difficult :)

A helpful feature would probably be an auto saver. Set a 1, 5 or custom hour timer and don’t have to worry about missing stuff. Rozoculi hostis will definitely conquer the island. Love the project. Keep it up 👍

I think it’s great how you managed to recreate the struggles of a palaeontologist by complete accident

I forgot how much I love The Bibites. Maybe someday it could be used as an educational tool or something!

Maybe, short of full saves, you could have the program randomly save the genes of a small number of creatures as the simulation progresses. It wouldn't be a full DNA database, but it could have a few samples... the little fossil evidence to help you figure out how things evolved.

The sheer dedication and complexity of this project definitely makes it one of the best evolution sims you can find for free, not to mention the style of the editing and pacing of the video is very easily digestible. Overall, well done, can't wait to see this project get bigger and more popular!

You know you've suceeded in creating a good simulation when even things that you didn't intend to happen (like bibites crossing the void and migrating) somewhat follow real world patterns Amazing job!!

I’m really excited for this since it has been a while since a long simulation(which was only 1 hour and was 2 years ago). Also P.S people on the thebibites reddit have done significantly longer simulations.

Love the naming ideas! It's like I'm watching a real documentary about an alien planet.

While creating actual automatic taxonomic classifications would be downright impossible, have you considered creating a UI which allows you to click on a bibite and view all of its ancestors? Since bibites reproduce asexually this would just be a single sliding scale through time. Issues with storage may arise, which is why I would also implement a slider that lets the user decide how many generations back they want it to be saved.

Man, I don't know about other people, but this content is so great that I could wait an age for more. I'll always be around to catch more of this amazing series. Thank you. <3