Name: _____________________________
Date: __________________
Ecosystem Study Guide
Test Date: _______________________
Your child should be able to understand and work with the following words from our
Ecosystem Unit:
Carnivore – an animal that eats only other animals
Herbivore – an animal that eats only plants
Omnivore – an animal that eats both plants and other animals
Predator – an animal that hunts other animals for food
Prey – the animal being hunted as food
Adaptation – special characteristics that help an organism survive in its
environment
Camouflage – an adaptation that allows an organism to blend in with its surroundings
Mimicry – when an animal imitates the color or the shape of another organism
Habitat – the home of a living thing
Community – all the living things in an ecosystem
Ecosystem – all the living and nonliving things
Population – a group made up of only one kind of organism
Producers – something that makes its own food (plant)
Consumer – something that eats producers or other consumers for energy
• Students should be able to label a given pair of organisms as predator or prey. (For
example: Given a lizard and hawk: lizard – prey…..hawk – predator.)
• Students should be able to compare and contrast characteristics of various ecosystems:
-desert (dry, little rain, can be hot or cold)
- forest (lots of trees, two kinds – temperate and tropical)
- grassland (not a lot of trees, don’t get too much or too little rain
lots of herbivores live there)
- arctic (little rain or snow, cold winters and cool summers, part is
always frozen)
• Students should be able to explain the importance of the sun in the food chain. (The
sun provides the producers with the energy needed to make their own food.)
• Students should be able to explain why a food chain begins with a producer. (Producers
use the energy from the sunlight to make their own food. Then a consumer gets its
energy by eating the producer. Those consumers are eaten by another consumer to
meet its energy needs, and so on. If there were no producers, everything else would
die.)
• Students should be able to give an example of a specific animal’s adaptation and
describe how that adaptation helps the animal to survive. (For example, a bull frog has
eyes on the top of its head to allow the frog to lookout for danger without leaving the
water. Its adaptation is the position of its eyes to help keep it safe from predators.)
• Students should be able to create and explain a simple food chain.
sun
algae
mosquito
dragonfly
fish
raccoon
• Students should be able to explain the effect of removing an organism from a given food
chain. (The organism that is below it will increase because there is no longer a predator.
The population of the organism above it will decrease because its food source has
gotten smaller.)