Discover: Build a Food Chain

To construct your own food chains, you need to understand the relationships among the organisms in an ecosystem.

• Which organisms are the producers?  These will always be the plants at the bottom of a food chain.  
• When you consider the consumers, you may have to do some research to discover who eats what.  
• Often, decomposers are left out of food chains.  When they are included, they always come at the end of the food chain to recycle nutrients to be used again by the producers.
• Remember that the arrow always points to the organism that is doing the eating.  It represents the flow of energy in the ecosystem.

This simple food chain shows the movement of energy as it goes from the grass all the way to the owl and is recycled back to the grass.  (Notice which way the arrows point!)

Remember how frogs are important indicators.  Look at where the frog is in this food chain.  If the number of frogs was to decline due to toxins in the environment, both sides of the food chain would be affected.  The raccoons would have less food and starve while the number of grasshoppers would increase and eat all the grass.  Food chains allow us to see how changes might affect an ecosystem.

How can I construct a food chain?

Resources

• BrainPOP Food Chains
• To access this video use this login information: Username: 0099 Password: students
  
• Kids Corner Food Chain Game

  Skill Builder

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Click a link below to learn how to:

construct a Food Chain in Google Drawing Docs

do an image search