Essential Questions
• What are the implications of
interconnectedness?
• How does understanding
interconnectedness affect
perception?
st
1
law & food webs
1st Law: Everything is connected to
everything else
Making connections:
1. What is the connection between the rise of
McDonalds outlets in China and the massive
deforestation in the Amazon forest in Brazil?
2. Take the Carbon footprint test:
http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/
http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/
Activity: Web Game
PART 1: Getting organized
1. Get assigned card.
2. On your island work together to figure out:
1.
2.
What is your role in nature?
How can you survive?
3. Discuss vocabulary.
4. As a class, group yourselves according to
similarities based on your role in nature.
Autotroph / primary producer
• Makes it’s own food (glucose) from primary
energy source (sun or deep-sea thermal vents)
– Use photosynthesis or chemosynthesis
– PPP: A plant = producer = photosynthesis
Heterotroph/ consumer
• Cannot make their own food
• Must eat other living organisms
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/mrshart/933775
Herbivore or primary consumer
• Eat producers
– Folivore (leaves)
– granivore (seed)
– necativore (nectar)
– xylophage (wood)
- frigivore (fruit)
- mucivore (sap)
-palynivore (pollen)
Secondary- quarternary consumers
• Eat consumer level below them
– Carnivore = meat-eaters
– Omnivore = eat animals and plants (like 1⁰ consumers
do)
• Predator- the animal doing the hunting & eating
• Prey- the animal being hunted & eaten
Top/ Apex predator
• The top-end of the food chain
• Is not eaten by anything else (is not prey)
because it has little/no natural predators*
* Humans often not consider natural predators
Detritivores
• Eat detritus: plant and animal remains, shed
parts (skin, antlers, leaves), and wastes
• Scavengers- detritivores that specialized in
carrion (dead animal bodies) or other animal
wastes
Decomposers (aka saprotrophs)
• digest food outside their bodies
– Fungi eat the dead matter by releasing acid found
in their body to melt the decaying material, then
sucking in all the acid, along with the melted
material
• Help speed up the decaying process
Cool fact: A gram of soil typically contains
40 million bacterial cells, and the bacteria
on Earth form a biomass that exceeds
that of all living plants and animals
Activity: Web Game
PART 1: Getting organized
1. Get assigned card.
2. On your island work together to figure out:
1.
2.
What is your role in nature?
How can you survive?
3. Discuss vocabulary.
4. As a class, group yourselves according to
similarities based on your role in nature.
PART 2: Making the web
Individual Goal: Find a way to survive
1.
Using string, connect yourself to all possible
food sources
e.g. horse eats the grass  grass “eats” the sun
(string connects horse to grass and same string
connects grass to sun; cut string to indicate
end of chain)
Note: Use 1 string per food source
The difference between webs and chains
top predator
PART 2: Making the web
Individual Goal: Find a way to survive
1.
Using string, connect yourself to all possible
food sources
e.g. horse eats the grass  grass “eats” the sun
(string connects horse to grass and same string
connects grass to sun; cut string to indicate
end of chain)
Note: Use 1 string per food source
PART 3: Changes in the web
Goal: Find out how species affect each other
1.
What happens when one species is removed?
a.
2.
producer
b. consumer(type)
c. decomposer
What happens when there are changes with the
“SUN”?
REFLECTION:
What are the implications of
interconnectedness?
1.
What happens when one species is removed?
a. producer
b. consumer-omnivore/ carnivore/ herbivore
c. decomposer
2.
What happens when changes with the “SUN”
happens?
SOME GLOBAL ISSUES
Pollution
Deforestation
Biodiversity
Conservation
Endangered Species
Renewable Energy Global Warming
Ozone Depletion
Soil Degradation
G M Food Urbanization
Pesticides
Hazardous Waste
WaterFish Depletion
Invasive Species
Poverty
Natural Disaster Prevention
Global Infectious Diseases
• Following slides to use for web game
sun, grasshopper, robin, grass, hawk, quail, mouse, worm,
rabbit, caribou, flea, owl, wheat, tick, fox, weeds, coyote,
mushrooms, bacteria, vulture, elephant, tree, hyena, zebra,
cheetah, termite, lion, snake
lion
grasshopper sparrow
grass dung beetle
hawk
rat
rabbit flea
worm
wildebeest
owl
tick
fox
termite
snake mushrooms
bacteria
vulture elephant
acacia
hyena zebra
cheetah
Just for teacher reference
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/foodchain/