1.
The food that a high school student eats during a typical day might weigh about 5-8 pounds. Why does this student not gain 5-8 pounds in body weight each day?
(Answers vary) Students digestive systems break down the food and use the molecules for various purposes. But some of what we eat is not digested (cellulose from plants) or is water that is passed from the body.
2. What organism do you represent?
3. How much energy do you begin with?
4. What can you eat?
5. What can eat you?
6. How much energy were you left with at the end of five encounters?
7. What did placing of poker chips into the "energy loss" containers represent? How is this energy lost in a natural ecosystem? Energy loss chips represent the energy that a predator spends when seeking prey, and attempting to catch and kill it. Predation can be very expensive.
8. How much energy do you have at the end of five encounters in the second simulation?
9. Which organisms died?
10. Which organisms finished with the most energy and which finished with the least energy? Explain why?
11. About one third of the students were assigned as plants and only one assigned the wolf and the cougar. Why was this important? There need to be many plants to support the entire food web, since all food chains start with a producer.
12. Why did some organisms start out with more EU than others? The energy value of a given organism is based on its mass and the type of matter its body contains. The more matter it contains, the more chemical energy is stored in the molecules.

13. Create a clear food web diagram for the forest ecosystem simulated in this activity.
Insects
Trout
Cougar
Raccoon
Plant
Wolf
Frog Deer
14. Which organisms represent the producers, first order consumers,second order consumers, and third order consumers?
Tertiary consumers---Wolf, Cougar, Raccoon
Secondary consumers --- Frog, Trout
Primary consumers --- Insects, Deer
Producers --- Plants
15. Were there any fourth order consumers? If so, what? A wolf and a cougar can be considered a fourth order consumer when they’ve eaten a raccoon
16. What were the limitations of the model? While the relative quantities of the organisms at each trophic level is an accurate ratio, and animals expend energy in hunting, the model is not realistic in that an encounter between a predator and a prey species sometimes did not result in the predator eating the prey because the prey had done the asking. Also, organisms can identify other species by looking at them.
17. Because of a nearby insect problem, county authorities sprayed the entire area with insecticide. This killed most of the insects in the ecosystem. Hypothesize the effect this would have upon the numbers of the other organisms in the area. (Answers vary) More plants would be available for the deer and raccoons, but less food would be available for the trout, and the frogs. Deer and raccoons may thrive until the trout and frog populations decline, when raccoons would lose important food sources. If plants rely on the insects to pollinate, then entire ecosystem would collapse if the plants could not produce another generation.