April 9

Food Chains & Food Webs: You Are What You Eat! 🌿🦗🦅

📅 Covered in Class: April 9
📌 Students who didn’t finish the activity page in class were assigned it as homework.

In this lesson, students explored how energy flows through ecosystems by studying food chains and food webs. They learned to identify different roles in an ecosystem—from producers to various types of consumers—and practiced analyzing energy relationships among organisms.

🧬 What We Covered:

🔹 Producers (Autotrophs)

• Make their own food using sunlight through photosynthesis.

• Examples: Plants, algae.
  
  

🔹 Consumers (Heterotrophs)

• Get energy by eating other organisms.

• Types include:

  • Herbivores – eat only plants

  • Carnivores – eat only meat

  • Omnivores – eat both plants and animals

  • Scavengers – eat dead animals

  • Decomposers (Detritivores) – break down dead material and return nutrients to the soil
    
    

🔹 Trophic Levels in Food Chains

• Primary consumers eat producers.

• Secondary consumers eat primary consumers.

• Tertiary consumers eat secondary or primary consumers and are often top predators.

🔹 Energy Transfer

• Energy moves in the direction of the arrow, from the food source to the organism that consumes it.

• Organisms use energy through cellular respiration to carry out life processes.

🔹 Food Webs

• A food web is made up of many overlapping food chains that show how energy moves through an entire ecosystem.

📝 Practice & Activity Page

Students applied their knowledge by:

• Labeling organisms in a diagram as producers, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, or decomposers.

• Answering questions about how energy moves, how populations affect each other, and what happens if a species increases or decreases.

🌍 Why This Matters:

Understanding food chains and webs helps students see how energy is passed through ecosystems and how all organisms are interconnected. It also highlights the importance of every species in maintaining balance.

✅ Reminder: If you didn’t finish the activity page in class, be sure to complete it for homework! 📚🌞🌿