Food Chains
What is always first in a food chain?
Plants (or Sun)
Name three decomposers.
Worms, fungi, bacteria, slime molds, beetles, termites, snails, slugs, bacteria, etc.
What do we call all the members of one type of organism living in one place?
A population.
What do we call the process of changing something to use it again?
Recycling.
What do we call the scientific study of the relationships between living things and their environments?
Ecology
What do you call an organism that makes its own food?
Producer (plants).
What do decomposers do?
The break down dead and decaying things in nature.
What could make a population increase (go up)?
Good weather, abundance of food, enough space, reduced predators, no disease.
Water, trees, oil, food, air, coal, iron, etc.
What is a resource?
Something valuable or useful to a place or person.
Living things, especially animals, that feed off of other living things.
Consumers
Give an example of nature recycling.
An earthworm eating dead plants and turning their nutrients back into soil.
Give an example of an interaction between a living thing and a non living thing.
A bird flying through the air.
What are the three R's?
(hint: the help us make less waste)
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Would it be bad if tigers were extint?
Why or why not?
Yes, because the population of their prey would increase, causing the ecosystem to go out of balance.
By what process does a producer make its own food?
Photosynthesis.
True or False.
Most decomposers are bacteria.
True.
Herbivores only eat plants and carnivores only eat other animals.
When is something a pollutant?
If it harms the environment.
Can the human population grow forever?
No, we would run out of resources, create too much waste, run out of room to live.
What is the difference between a food chain and a food web?
A food chain shows what each living thing eats, and a food web is all the food chains connected together.
What would happen if there were no decomposers?
An enormous amount of waste would pile up covering the earth, and we would not have nutrients supplied to our plants.
What does population density tell you?
How many of a certain species in living in one place (a unit of area).
How do pollutants get into our environment?
Factories, chemicals, trash, litter, etc.
Give an example of a 4 part food chain.
producers, herbivore, consumer, consumer