Unit 9: Food Chains and Food Webs

Unit 9: Food Chains and Food Webs

Unit Focus

This unit reviews energy production in plants and animals, feeding relationships, and symbiosis in the ocean. Students will become familiar with the hierarchy in food chains and will become better acquainted with food webs and symbiosis between marine organisms.

A food web consists of many food chains. A food chain only follows just one path as animals find food. eg: A hawk eats a snake, which has eaten a frog, which has eaten a grasshopper, which has eaten grass. A food web shows the many different paths plants and animals are connected.

Student Goals

1. Define food chain.
2. Identify producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, and decomposers within a food chain.
3. Define food web.
4. Understand that simple food chains are vulnerable to extreme changes and that food webs are more complex and stable.
5. Know that species within a food web may interact with each other through commensalism, mutualism, or parasitism.