Food+ChainsWebs

[|Starts with Producers MR. Parr]

Lesson Power Point

Test your Knowledge!

https://youtu.be/Cd1M9xD482s- Make me a Genuis

1. Food Chains Web Quest

2. BrainPop Video game

3. Food Web Game-Different Ecosystems

4. Energy Pyramid Game!

5. Energy Pyramid Up Close; Check it out!

6. Food Chain Game- Test your Skills

7. Test your skills with this FOOD WEB game!

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= Food Chains & Food Webs = Do you like to play games? If you do, you will need energy. Every time you run or jump, you are using up energy in your body. How do you get the energy to play? You get energy from the food you eat. Similarly, all living things get energy from their food so that they can move and grow. As food passes through the body, some of it is digested. This process of digestion releases energy.

A **food chain** shows how each living thing gets its food. Some animals eat plants and some animals eat other animals. For example, a simple food chain links the trees & shrubs, the giraffes (that eat trees & shrubs), and the lions (that eat the giraffes). Each link in this chain is food for the next link. A food chain always starts with plant life and ends with an animal.

> > >> >> >>> >>> e.g., killer whales in an ocean food web ... phytoplankton → small fishes → seals → killer whales > > > These decomposers speed up the decaying process that releases mineral salts back into the food chain for absorption by plants as nutrients. > > Image Map of the Nitrogen Cycle - What happens in the soil? Do you know why there are **more herbivores than carnivores**?
 * 1) Plants are called **producers** because they are able to use light energy from the Sun to produce food (sugar) from carbon dioxide and water.
 * 1) Animals cannot make their own food so they must eat plants and/or other animals. They are called **consumers**. There are three groups of consumers.
 * 1) Animals that eat ONLY PLANTS are called **herbivores** (or __primary__ consumers).
 * 1) Animals that eat OTHER ANIMALS are called **carnivores**.
 * carnivores that eat herbivores are called __secondary__ consumers
 * carnivores that eat other carnivores are called __tertiary__ consumers
 * 1) Animals and people who eat BOTH animals and plants are called **omnivores**.
 * 1) Then there are [|**decomposers**] (bacteria and fungi) which feed on decaying matter.

In a food chain, energy is passed from one link to another. When a herbivore eats, only a fraction of the energy (that it gets from the plant food) becomes new body mass; the rest of the energy is lost as waste or used up by the herbivore to carry out its life processes (e.g., movement, digestion, reproduction). Therefore, when the herbivore is eaten by a carnivore, it passes only a small amount of total energy (that it has received) to the carnivore. Of the energy transferred from the herbivore to the carnivore, some energy will be "wasted" or "used up" by the carnivore. The carnivore then has to eat many herbivores to get enough energy to grow.

Because of the large amount of energy that is lost at each link, the amount of energy that is transferred gets lesser and lesser ...

>> The above [|energy pyramid] shows many trees & shrubs providing food and energy to giraffes. Note that as we go up, there are fewer giraffes than trees & shrubs and even fewer lions than giraffes ... as we go further along a food chain, there are fewer and fewer consumers. In other words, a large mass of living things at the base is required to support a few at the top ... many herbivores are needed to support a few carnivores >> >> There cannot be too many links in a single food chain because the animals at the end of the chain would not get enough food (and hence energy) to stay alive. >> >> Most animals are part of more than one food chain and eat more than one kind of food in order to meet their food and energy requirements. These [|interconnected food chains] form a **food web**. >> Note that the arrows are drawn from food source to food consumers ... in other words, you can substitute the arrows with the words "eaten by"
 * 1) **The further along the food chain you go, the less food (and hence energy) remains available.**
 * [[image:http://www.vtaide.com/png/foodweb/xfoodchains.gif width="542" height="432" align="left" caption="energy pyramid, biomass pyramid"]] ||  ||
 * 1) **Most food chains have no more than four or five links.**

Nitrogen is used by life forms to carry out many of the functions of life. This element is especially important to plant life. Yet nitrogen in its gaseous form is almost entirely unusable to life forms. It must first be converted or ‘fixed’ into a more usable form. The process of converting nitrogen is called fixation. There are specialized bacteria whose function it is to fix nitrogen, converting it, so that it can be used by plants. There are still other bacteria who do the reverse. That is, they return nitrogen to is gaseous form.
 * The following is a possible food web: ||  ||

After nitrogen is fixed, it can be absorbed, and used by plants, and subsequently by animals. The process of nitrogen being fixed, used by plants and animals, and later returned to the atmosphere is referred to as the nitrogen cycle.

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