In this activity, students will learn about food webs, discovering the many ways that plants and animals of a forest ecosystem are connected. This hands-on activity helps students in grades 3-5 put their new knowledge about food chains and food webs into practice. It also explores interdependent relationships in ecosystems.
Background: A forest is a complex living system. While its appearance is often dominated by trees, a healthy forest is composed of many different animals and plants that interact with and depend on each other.
A food chain is a simplified way of showing energy relationships between plants and animals in an ecosystem. For example, a food chain of sun > plant seed > mouse > owl shows that a plant seed that grows from the sun’s energy is eaten by a mouse, which in turn is eaten by an owl. However, in reality it is rare for an animal to eat only one type of food. A food web represents the interaction of many food chains in an ecosystem.