Worksheet Challenge
Which is a producer: lettuce, mouse, human, or fish?
Lettuce
Which makes its own food: grass or a lion?
Grass
What is the original energy source for most food chains?
The sun.
Does a food chain show one feeding path or many connected feeding paths?
One feeding path.
What group of organisms breaks down dead plants and animals?
Decomposers
What do we call a consumer that eats producers?
A primary consumer.
What do we call an organism that gets food by eating other organisms?
A consumer.
What process allows plants to use sunlight to make food?
Photosynthesis
What do we call a model made of many connected food chains?
A food web.
Name one type of decomposer.
Fungi or bacteria.
Put these in order to show energy moving through a food chain: human, sun, cow, grass.
Sun → grass → cow → human.
What does a zebra eat in a grassland ecosystem?
Grass
Besides energy, food provides materials that help animals do what two things?
Grow and repair their bodies.
What do the arrows in a food chain show?
The direction energy moves, from the organism being eaten to the organism eating it.
What useful materials do decomposers return to the environment?
Nutrients that plants can use to grow.
True or false: A zebra is an apex predator. Explain.
False. A zebra eats plants and is prey for other animals.
Name a predator that eats zebras.
A lion or a hyena.
In the food chain grass → rabbit, which organism receives energy by eating the other?
The rabbit receives energy by eating grass.
Complete this food chain: sun → grass → zebra → _____.
Lion
If fewer predators caused the number of plant-eaters to increase, what might happen to the grass?
More grass might be eaten, leaving less grass available.
How do apex predators help keep an ecosystem balanced?
They help control prey populations.
Why can one animal be part of several different food chains?
It may eat different organisms and be eaten by different predators.
Why is less energy available at each higher level of a food chain?
Organisms use energy for life processes and release some as heat, so less passes to the next level.
A mouse eats seeds from a plant, and an owl eats the mouse. Put these organisms in order to show energy flow.
Plant → mouse → owl.
Describe two problems that could happen if decomposers disappeared.
Dead material would pile up, and fewer nutrients would be recycled for plants to use.