This passing of energy from the sun to plants to animals to other animals is called a food chain. Ask students to name all the different animals that are dependent on the one tree. First demonstrate a food chain, a simple interdependence , by linking the student with the sun card the source of all energy to the student with the grass card to the student with the zebra card to the student with the lion card.
Balance is key! Explain that the interactions in a grasslands system are more complicated than this. Have the participants now stand in a circle, out of order i. Give the ball of string to the person with the sun. Then ask that person to pass the yarn to the person with a card of an organism that the sun supports. If the sun supports more than one organism in the circle, pass the string back to the sun and from the sun to the other organism that it supports. Keep going through the chain until you get to the top consumers.
The string will be a tangled web in the middle of the circle. Food chains are complicated, and the balance they create is essential. For example, the impact of overhunting will cause the lions to drop their strings.
What happens? This activity requires a large open area. In a class of 25 to 40 students, choose three to five to be predators and seven to ten to be plant-eaters. The remainder will be plants. This represents a balanced system where plants are more plentiful than plant-eaters, plant-eaters more plentiful than predators, and predators are the least plentiful.
The students can select which plant-eaters and predators will be in their groups. Each group selects hand-signals that will differentiate them from the other groups. Example: the plants may want to hold their hands out to their sides to represent leaves, the plant-eaters oryx may hold their hands on the heads to represent horns, and the predators lions may hold their hands up like paws with the claws showing.
The predators try to tag the plant-eaters who try to tag the plants. Since predators decompose when they die and become fertilizer, the plants try to tag the predators. Once you are tagged, you turn into whatever tagged you. After a period of time, stop the game to see how many plants, plant-eaters, and predators are left. Play should resume but should be stopped a few times before the end to determine what has happened and why.
After playing a few rounds of the game, select one of the plants to re-enter the game as a human. The rules for the human are different: the human can tag anyone, but no one can tag the human. Each time the human tags someone, that player becomes another human.
See how long it takes before all players have become changed into humans. Discuss the changes and relationships that the game illustrates. Some questions for discussion might include:. Sign up for our Interactive Classroom - Coming Soon! This predator is adapted to hunt at night. In the French Guiana this is one of the major night heron species with its cousin the Yellow-crowned night-heron Nycticorax violacea.
Feeds mainly on aquatic animals, including fish, amphibians and insects. Coastal swamps. Every plant and animal species, no matter how big or small, depends to some extent on another plant or animal species for its survival. It could be bees taking pollen from a flower, photosynthesis of plants, deer eating shrub leaves or lions eating the deer. A food chain shows how energy is transferred from one living organism to another via food. It is important for us to understand how the food chain works so that we know what are the important living organisms that make up the food chain and how the ecology is balanced.
Photosynthesis is only the beginning of the food chain. There are many types of animals that will eat the products of the photosynthesis process. You must first complete the following:. Results Question results are being recorded. Results 0 of 5 questions answered correctly Your Time: Time has elapsed. Answered Review. All food contains energy. Where does the energy come from first? What do plants use energy to do? People use energy to grow and move.
How does energy from the Sun get into a cow? End of the chain Food chains rarely have more than five links. Share this page Facebook Facebook Created with Sketch. Twitter Pinterest. You might also be interested in Decomposers Not everything in a food chain gets eaten. Upsetting the food chain Damage to any part of a food chain can cause problems right along it.
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