Wa-Tor

Wa-Tor for Windows is a population ecology simulation game, based on a random model. Wa-Tor is a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) planet completely covered by an ocean and populated by two species. You pit hungry sharks against tasty fish and see who comes out on top.

The populations may fluctuate in a similar manner to the Lotka-Volterra model, continuing for hundreds of generations, or the populations may go extinct in a very short time, depending on the initial parameters and subsequent random events. The population can become chaotic for a time, then return to relatively regular fluctuations.

You control the initial number of sharks and fishes, their breeding rates, and the shark starvation time. Sharks and fish then breed and move about randomly, with the sharks eating any nearby fish. The dynamics of the populations can be watched on the Wa-Tor world map as well as on several types of graphs (population curves, predator/prey graphs, or age structure plots).

The results may be saved to a comma-delimited file and imported to a spreadsheet program for further analysis and graphing. The program is based on an idea first published in Scientific American's "Computer Recreation" column in 1984.