Day+5+Ecological+Organization

1. Warm Up - 15 min 2. Notes: Ecological Organization & Food Webs/Chains - 20 min 3. Food Chain Practice - 15 min 4. Food Web Activity - 30 min 5. Food Chain/Web Games - 10 min
 * Daily Agenda: **

**Objectives:** 5.01 Investigate and analyze the interrelationships among organisms, populations, communities, and ecosystems.
 * Techniques of field ecology.
 * Abiotic and biotic factors.
 * Carrying capacity.

5.02 Analyze the flow of energy and the cycling of matter in the ecosystem
 * Relationship of the carbon cycle to photosynthesis and respiration.
 * Trophic levels - direction and efficiency of energy transfer.

**Food Web Activity:** Let’s see if we can build a food web! This is an Antarctic food web. The organisms that fit into the web are listed below it. The trophic table below tells you a little bit about each organism’s role in the food web. Your job is to place the organisms in their correct places on the food web. Remember that the arrows indicate the direction of energy flow!

Click [|here] to get started! When finished, fill in food web on your sheet to use as reference to answer the following questions:

Now let’s take a closer look at the food web you created. What would happen if you removed one of the organisms from the food web? Are there other organisms that could take its place? How would the organism’s predators/grazers respond? How would the organism’s prey/food respond? Let’s start at the top and try a few scenarios: (answer in complete sentences!!)

>  1) What would you hypothesize might happen to the other organisms in the web, if killer whales went extinct? > 2) What might happen if we exhausted the fishery (through over fishing), and fish were no longer a component of our food web? > 3) What might happen if we removed the algae from the food web? > 4) Which scenario above affected the most organisms? > 5) What does this tell you about the importance of the base of the food web?

The food web you created in the food web game included producers and consumers, but it didn’t include all of the types of organisms that play a role in the food web. Decomposers also play an extremely important role in the food web. What are the decomposers? Bacteria! That’s right, just like the bacteria in every terrestrial environment, bacteria also live in the marine environment. And just like terrestrial bacteria, marine bacteria are EVERYWHERE and impact EVERYTHING! In their role as decomposers, they break down dead plant and animal matter and release simple molecules that can be absorbed and used by autotrophs and some heterotrophs. Now that you know what the decomposers are and what they do, place them on your food web and draw arrows to show how they interact with the other organisms in the web.


 * Finished Early? Try these games:**

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