🦊How Hungry are Foxes in Minecraft? 🍗

An experiment to understand ecosystems in Minecraft!

Have you ever rage-quit coming back from a mining trip to find a fox got into your farm and killed all your chickens? 😤 Or maybe you’re better at fox-proofing your farms than I am…

But this isn’t just a Minecraft problem, farmers IRL deal with it too. Foxes 🦊 (Minecraft and real-life) are a predator, hunting chickens 🐔 which are their prey (or target). All animals will have their own predator-prey relationships (think lions hunting wildebeest on wildlife documentaries) which affect how many animals are in the habitat. So understanding these relationships are crucial for conservation scientists and ecologists (the scientists who study nature) to keep ecosystems balanced.

This resource will talk you through an in-game experiment to help us understand the ecosystems inside Minecraft. We tested this in Minecraft: Java Edition version 1.21.10.

🌏 World downloads

FunctionalResponse_java.zip

FunctionalResponse_bedrock.zip

🖨️ Printable worksheet

🌳 Ecology caps on! 🎓

🛑 Chicken Apocalypse: The Aftermath

Imagine you’re a Minecraft Ecologist for a moment. If the fox eats all your chickens, their population hits 0. That means they are extinct on your farm. You're left with a painful grind to find and bring back two wild chickens just to restart your whole breeding program. Not the vibe when you're trying to focus on your next epic build 😞

🧠 Brainstorming solutions

How would you prevent your chickens from going extinct?

There are plenty of ways to answer this question and I encourage you to experiment in your world! This worksheet will guide you through one of the tools ecologists can use.

What factors will affect how many chickens are left when foxes attack?

A super basic factor is how many chickens there are to begin with. Maybe we should just breed so many chickens that a fox can’t eat them all quickly enough.

How would you find out how many chickens a fox can eat?

We need to be methodical like a scientist 🥼 Maybe we could put a fox in an enclosure with a set number of chickens and see how many chickens it kills 📉 We could start with a small number of chickens and increase it until a fox can’t kill them all.

This is what ecologists call a functional response experiment. So let’s head into a Creative world and do a that with our foxes and chickens!

🏗️ Lab Prep: Building the Battle Arena

If you don't want to use the world download, this is how you set it up yourself:

Fire up a Superflat world in creative mode.
Fence off a 16 x 16 arena for the experiment, 4 blocks high to stop the fox cheating and jumping out
The 'Holding area': Build a small, 4x6 side room off the main arena. Use a fence gate to connect it. This is where the fox chills (or plots 😈) before and after each round.
Use 1 fox spawn egg in the holding area (or catch a wild one 😉)

🎮 GO TIME! Run the Experiment

Each round of the experiment will run like this:

Chicken drop 🐣: Spawn x number of chickens on random blocks around the arena (we’ll explain more later).
Release the beast: Open the gate to let the fox in and start the timer.
Battle time: Let the fox hunt the chickens for 2 minutes. (You can change the amount of time, as long as it is the same for each round)
Round End: Once the timer buzzes, use the lead to quickly drag the fox back into the holding cell. CLOSE THE GATE! 🔒
Data entry: Count and record (table below or your own method) the surviving chickens 🐓
Calculate: Figure out the kills (Chickens provided – Chickens alive)
Reset: Pick up all the feathers and raw chicken drops. Prepare for the next round with a new batch of chickens.

What is x chickens?

The number of chickens we provide is the independent variable (the thing we change). We're using a pattern: 0, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 (and maybe more!) chickens 🐣.

Why have 0 chickens?

The 0 round is our control (or 'sanity check'). We assume 0 chickens are killed, but a good scientist always checks their assumptions! It proves our results are actually because of the number of chickens available, and not a Minecraft glitch 🤦

Why double the chickens?

This is called an exponential increase 📈. We do this to jump to a high number of chickens quickly. If we see anything interesting between say, 32 and 64, we zoom in later and look at numbers between them.

💯 The Scoreboard

You can use the table on the printable worksheet or make your own

example results table
Round	🍽️ Number of chickens provided	💪 Number of survivors	💀 Number of chickens killed (chickens provided – chickens alive)	⚖️ Kill ratio (chickens killed / chickens provided)
0	0
1	2
2	4
3	8
4	16
5	32
6	64

📈 Your Functional Response Graph

We need a graph!

You can use square or graph paper, the graphing function in a spreadsheet app, or (if you’re good at coding) in Python.

Horizontal (x) axis: number of chickens provided
Vertical (y) axis: number of chickens killed
Plot your data points and join them up with straight lines.

📊 An example graph

Example functional response graph. x-axis is 'prey available', and y-axis is 'prey consumed'. Type 1 is a diagonal straight line; Type 2 curves upward in an S-shape; Type 3 starts steep and flattens

❓ Interpreting the Curve: The Biology Behind the Blocks

In the example graph, ecologists have categorised 3 general ‘types’ of functional response. Which shape does your graph look like?

Does the graph remind you of any other biological systems you learnt about in school?

Let’s think about the biology, why might the curve flatten at the top? It might help to think about why you can’t eat 10 pizzas 🍕 in one go.

Prey side: what would make prey easier or harder to kill / consume? How would this affect the curve?

What does this experiment tell us about our chicken farm ecosystem?

What can we do to improve the experiment?

🖥️ Are we living in a simulation?

What you just did is run a simulation. Scientists IRL use these types of computer models to understand things like population changes, disease spread, and climate change effects.

To create a simulation, ecologists will approximate a set of real-world parameters as rules. These rules are coded into software and then run.

🎮 Minecraft is already a simulation! Mojang wrote the parameters (rules) for mob behavior; foxes jump, chickens run, foxes kill at a certain rate. By running the experiment, you were using the game's code to proper science 🎉

🌐 Research simulations and models online

Why are simulations so powerful for scientists? (Hint: Can you test a world-ending event IRL? Nope.)

What would happen if we changed some of the parameters? Can we do that IRL?

What's the difference between the fox in your game and a fox in a real forest 🌳?

Why can't we use Minecraft for all ecology experiments?

🏞️Extension: Park Ranger Quest

You are the head ranger of a Minecraft nature reserve. Your goal is to create a sustainable population of free-roaming chickens 🐔, rabbits 🐰 and foxes 🦊 in a natural biome.

🗺️ Quest deets

🔎 Look up some IRL conservation techniques and try them in your own world in Minecraft!

What could you do with the organisms to help maintain this? These are what ecologists call biotic factors.

How about the terrain and habitat (abiotic factors)? Could you make some changes to the habitat to tilt the balance in one way or the other?

How is understanding functional response useful (or not) for this task?

What other things do we have to consider when protecting an ecosystem?

📚 Extra reading

Gina Vong

Gina is a PhD student at the University of York who is interning with SEB. She is passionate about meeting learners at their level and making science accessible to all. Outside of work, she enjoys playing Minecraft, doing nature photography and sewing her own clothes!

Disclaimer

This free educational resource is not an official Minecraft product/service and is not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.