Vocabulary
What do we call all the living and nonliving things in an area and their interactions?
What is an ecosystem?
A living thing uses energy from the Sun to make its own food. What is its role in an ecosystem?
What is a producer?
In the chain Grass → Rabbit → Snake → Hawk, which organism is the apex consumer?
What is the hawk?
What does a primary consumer eat?
Producers
A pond contains fish, frogs, plants, water, sunlight, and rocks. What is this an example of?
An ecosystem.
What is a group of the same type of individuals living in the same ecosystem called?
What is a population?
How do decomposers help the environment?
They help return nutrients to the environment.
In Sun → Grass → Cricket → Bird → Hawk, identify the primary consumer and explain how you know.
The cricket, because it eats the producer, grass.
What does a secondary consumer eat?
Primary consumers
What does a food chain show?
It shows the transfer of food energy from one organism to the next, or who gets energy from whom.
What do we call all the different organisms that live in the same place?
What is a community?
A rabbit and a mushroom both obtain energy in different ways. Explain how their roles differ.
A rabbit is a consumer that gets energy by eating other organisms. A mushroom is a decomposer that breaks down dead matter.
In the chain Grass → Rabbit → Snake → Hawk, explain why the snake is a secondary consumer.
The snake eats the rabbit, which is the primary consumer.
What is a consumer at the top of a food chain that is not normally hunted by another animal in that chain called?
An apex consumer
If one organism in an ecosystem changes or disappears, what might happen to the other organisms?
It can affect other organisms in the ecosystem.
What is the physical part of an ecosystem that provides an organism with food, water, shelter, and space?
What is a habitat?
A student classifies a tree as a consumer because it is alive. Explain the student's mistake.
Being alive does not make an organism a consumer. A tree is a producer because it makes its own food, usually using energy from the Sun.
A student draws arrows from the fox to the rabbit to the grass. What is incorrect about the arrows, and how should they be drawn?
The arrows show energy moving in the wrong direction. They should point from the grass to the rabbit to the fox.
In Sun → Grass → Cricket → Bird → Hawk → Fungi, what is the bird's role?
The secondary consumer.
What do we call a web that shows how different food chains overlap?
A food web.
A student says, 'A habitat and a niche are the same thing.' Explain the difference between these two terms using a bee as an example.
A habitat is the physical place that meets an organism's needs. A niche is its role in that habitat. For a bee, its niche includes getting food from flowers and helping pollinate plants.
An organism breaks down dead matter and helps return nutrients to the environment. A student calls it a producer because it helps the ecosystem. Explain why this classification is incorrect.
It is a decomposer, not a producer. Decomposers break down dead organisms and dead matter and return nutrients to the environment. Producers make their own food.
A food chain contains grass, a cricket, a bird, and a hawk. Explain how energy moves through these organisms and identify each organism's role.
Energy moves from grass to cricket to bird to hawk. Grass is the producer, cricket the primary consumer, bird the secondary consumer, and hawk the apex consumer.
A student is given this food chain:
Grass → Cricket → Bird → Hawk → Fungi
The student claims that the Fungi is the apex consumer because it eats the Hawk.
Explain why the hawk is the apex consumer. Then identify the role of the fungi and explain why it belongs at the end of this model.
The hawk is the apex consumer because it is at the top of the food chain and is not normally hunted by another animal in that chain. The fungi are decomposers because they break down dead organisms and other dead matter, helping return nutrients to the environment.
A student removes all the plants from a habitat. Explain one reason this change could affect consumers in that ecosystem.
Consumers that eat plants could lose their food source, which could affect other consumers that depend on them for food.