Simulating the Population Dynamics of Lizards in the Sand Dunes of the São Francisco River: A Simulator for the Calangos Game

Calangos is an under development educational game based on the fauna and flora of the desert-like field of the sand dunes in the middle São Francisco River, located within the Caatinga biome in Brazil. One of the player’s goals is to manage the behavior of species of lizards that inhabit this biome, with consequences to their ecology and evolution. For the development of the game, a prototype, or simulator, is proposed. This prototype will be used to simulate the natural predatorprey dynamics based on the Evolutionary Biology and Ecology literature. The objective of this paper is to introduce the simulator and present some key experimental results obtained with the simulations performed with it. The results clearly show that in a balanced environment without predators it is possible to observe a dynamic equilibrium of populations in accordance with a typical Lotka-Volterra model of population dynamics. In turn, it is also observed that in the most hostile environments containing large numbers of predators, the capability of evolution allows the lizard species to survive in the environment, which does not occur if the lizards’ evolution is disabled during the simulations. In the context of the Calangos game, the results presented here serve as the initial proof of concept necessary for the modeling of the lizards to be incorporated in the game.