Teacher Guide: Food Chain

Learning Objectives
Students will
Classify organisms as producers or consumers.
Observe a food chain in equilibrium.
Determine how one organism affects others in a food chain.
Observe how disturbing the equilibrium of an ecosystem can result in long-term
population fluctuations.

Vocabulary
consumer, ecosystem, equilibrium, food chain, population, predator, prey, producer
Lesson Overview
A food chain is a relationship between organisms in which
each species higher in the chain derives energy from the
species below. The Food Chain Gizmo shows a hypothetical
food chain in which hawks eat snakes, snakes eat rabbits, and
rabbits eat grass. The population of each organism can be
manipulated by the student, and the resulting effects on the
populations of other organisms can be observed over time.
The Student Exploration sheet contains two activities:

Activity A Students explore how changing one

population in the food chain affects the others.

Activity B Students observe the long-term changes

that result from major disturbances to the food chain.

Suggested Lesson Sequence

1. Pre-Gizmo activity
( 15 30 minutes)
Introduce the term food chain, and give the example from the Gizmo: Hawks eat snakes,
snakes eat rabbits, and rabbits eat grass. Ask students to come up with other examples
of food chains, including food chains that include people. Who can come up with the
longest food chain? The shortest?
As you discuss your food chains, ask students what all the food chains have in common.
What type of organism can be found at the bottom of almost any food chain? These
organisms dont need to eat other organisms; instead they produce their own food using
the energy of the Sun. Ask students to identify the producers and consumers in their
food chains.
You can also introduce a variety of other terms that are useful for describing animals.
These include predator, prey, scavenger, carnivore, herbivore, omnivore, primary
consumer, secondary consumer, autotroph, and heterotroph.

2. Prior to using the Gizmo

( 10 15 minutes)
Before students are at the computers, pass out the Student Exploration sheets and ask
students to complete the Prior Knowledge Questions. Discuss student answers as a
class, but do not provide correct answers at this point. Afterwards, if possible, use a
projector to introduce the Gizmo and demonstrate its basic operations. Demonstrate how
to take a screenshot and paste the image into a blank document.
3. Gizmo activities
( 15 20 minutes per activity)
Assign students to computers. Students can work individually or in small groups. Ask
students to work through the activities in the Student Exploration using the Gizmo.
Alternatively, you can use a projector and do the Exploration as a teacher-led activity.
4. Discussion questions
( 15 30 minutes)
As students are working or just after they are done, discuss the following questions:

What is the ultimate source of energy in a food chain?

On average, the hawk population is much smaller than the population of snakes,
which is much smaller than the population of rabbits. Why?

Why does a low population of hawks result in a low population of rabbits?

Why does a high population of hawks result in a low population of grass?

In what ways is this model not realistic?

5. Follow-up activity: Food webs

( 30 60 minutes)
The Food Chain Gizmo shows a simplified model. Each organism in the chain eats one
other organism, and is eaten by one other organism. In real ecosystems, of course,
animals have many sources of food. When you draw connections between all the
organisms in the ecosystem, you create a food web.
To create a living food web, print out pictures of various organisms within an ecosystem
and hand them out to your students. Have students stand in a large circle so there is
plenty of room for your web. Ask students what they think the relationships are between
these organismswho eats whom? Once these relationships have been established,
use yarn or rope to connect predator to prey, consumer to producer. Finally, discuss
what would happen to the web if one of the organisms were to disappear due to disease,
hunting, or habitat loss.
As a follow-up activity, divide the class into groups of 2 or 3, and assign an ecosystem to
each group. (Examples could be Alaskan tundra or Nebraska prairie.) Students can
use the Internet to research their ecosystem, create a list of key organisms, print out
pictures, and finally create a poster of their food web. On the poster, yarn can connect
the pictures and show the relationships among the organisms.
Scientific Background
The basic unit of ecology is the ecosystem. An ecosystem consists of the community of
interacting organisms living in an area, and the physical environment in which they live. The
most common type of interaction between two organisms in a community is one organism
feeding on another. In some cases, two species will work together for their mutual benefit. For

example, flowering plants are helpful to bees because they provide nectar as food for the bees.
In turn, bees are helpful to plants because they help them reproduce via pollination.
With the exception of deep-sea vents and other geothermal areas, the ultimate source of energy
in any ecosystem is the Sun. In the process of photosynthesis, plants and algae use the energy
of sunlight to build organic molecules. Primary consumers (herbivores) eat the plants, and
secondary consumers (carnivores) eat the primary consumers. In this way, the energy of the
Sun is passed up through the food chain.
When a consumer eats, only a fraction of the food energy is used to build tissue. The rest is
lost: Some energy is used in movement and other life processes, while some food is excreted
as waste. As a result, the total biomass of primary consumers is much less than the biomass of
producers, and the biomass of secondary consumers is less than that of primary consumers.
Decomposers such as fungi and bacteria play a vital role in the health of any ecosystem. When
organisms die, decomposers break down organic materials into basic components. These
components are returned to the soil, where they can be reused by plants.
Environmental connection: The wolves and moose of Isle Royale
Isle Royale is a small, 210-square-mile island near the northwest shore of Lake Superior. Since
the 1940s, the island has been home to wolves and moose. The moose forage on young trees,
grass, and water plants, while the wolves feed almost exclusively on moose. This isolated
ecosystem has provided a natural laboratory for studying the kinds of predator-prey
relationships that are modeled in the Food Chain Gizmo. Scientists have been continuously
monitoring moose and wolf populations on the island for over 50 years.
Much to the surprise of scientists, the wolf
and moose populations have fluctuated
wildly over the years. A high moose
population in the early 1970s led to a rapid
increase in the wolf population. Predation
by wolves caused the moose population to
decline, and this was followed by a crash in
the wolf population in the early 1980s. A
decade of low wolf numbers led to an alltime peak of the moose population in 1995.
The harsh winter of 1996 caused the
moose to crash, and the cycle continued.

Selected Web Resources

Food chain lesson: http://www.ecokids.ca/pub/eco_info/topics/frogs/chain_reaction/index.cfm
Food chains and food webs: http://www.vtaide.com/png/foodchains.htm
Food chain energy: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/F/FoodChains.html
Isle Royale: http://www.isleroyalewolf.org/overview/overview/at_a_glance.html
Related Gizmos:
Forest Ecosystem: http://www.explorelearning.com/gizmo/id?639
Prairie Ecosystem: http://www.explorelearning.com/gizmo/id?647
Coral Reefs 1 Abiotic Factors: http://www.explorelearning.com/gizmo/id?1056