FOOD CHAINS AND FOOD WEBS

Monday 12 December 2011

WORKSHEETS

Food Chain and Webs Cloze

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Food chains only show one possible source of food for the animal. A better way of seeing what an animal eats is to construct a food web. A food web describes all the relationships of one animal or plant to the other members of the community. Most plants and animals are members of many different food chains. The animal eats a variety of different foods, but it is being preyed on by a number of predators. A field will have many food chains. These might include:

clover ---> worm ----> robin ---> mosquitoes

clover ---> worm ----> raccoon

clover ---> groundhog ---> mosquitoes

alder ----> white-tailed deer ---> mosquitoes

The food web diagram allows us to trace quickly these different food chains and to see how each chain is related to all the other food chains. The above four food chains can be drawn as a single food web. The resulting food web shows at a glance how the plants and animals are interrelated.

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Bigger Food Chain

Bigger Food Chains
Here's another food chain, with a few more animals. It starts with acorns, which are eaten by mice. The mice are eaten by snakes, and then finally the snakes are eaten by hawks. At each link in the chain, energy is being transferred from one animal to another.

There can be even more links to any food chain. Here another animal is added. It goes

Grass to grasshopper to mouse to snake to hawk.

There is actually even more to this chain. After a hawk dies, fungi (like mushrooms) and other decomposersbreak down the dead hawk, and turn the remains of the hawk into nutrients, which are released into the so The nutrients (plus sun and water) then cause the grass to grow.

It's a full circle of life and energy!!

So food chains make a full circle, and energy is passed from plant to animal to animal to decomposer and back to plant! There can be many links in food chains but not TOO many. If there are too many links, then the animal at the evnd would not get enough energy.