Skip Navigation
How Stable is Your Food Web?
Duration: 105 minutes
Grade Levels: 5-9
Students will design and use a simple model to test cause and effect relationships within a marine food web, ranking ecosystems according to their stability when faced with a disturbance.
Grade Levels: 5-9
Duration: 105 minutes
Concepts/Skills: Life Science, Systems & System Models, Food webs
Objectives:
- Recognize a food web as a system, and describe a food web in terms of its components and its interactions.
- Provide examples of how a healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life.
- Design and use a simple model to test cause and effect relationships or interactions concerning the functioning of a marine food web.
Climate Standards Connections
| Next Generation Science Standards | ||
| Grade | Performance Expectation | Description |
| 5 | 5-LS2-1 | Develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment. |
| Climate Change Connections | ecosystems | |
| Clarification Statement & Assessment Boundary | Emphasis is on the idea that matter that is not food (air, water, decomposed materials in soil) is changed by plants into matter that is food. Examples of systems could include organisms, ecosystems, and the Earth. Assessment does not include molecular explanations. | |