Feeding Frenzy: Seasonal Upwelling: DLESE Teaching Box

Overview of the box

Concepts and Standards

Lessons:

1 Marine food webs &
energy flow

Activities:

1 Making algae grow.

2 Ocean surfaces over time

3 Research a marine organism

4 Introduction to
marine food web

5 Marine food webs

6 Class marine food web

2 Primary production
& upwelling

3 Seasonal upwelling

4 An assessment:
Read all about it!

Online resources

Student Web Page

Teaching Boxes Home

Introduction to Marine Food Web

Materials / Preparation

You will need the Macromedia Flash Player installed in order to play the online food web games. There is a link to a free download at the Macromedia Downloads site. You may want to have your school’s technical personnel assist.

Students will be visiting two websites: Food Web Matching Game and Cool Projects (Gone Fishing) site that contains The Food Web Challenge. Both accessible from the Exploring Oceans Student Web Page.

Grouping

Groups of two to three per computer

Teacher tips

Remember to have students observe the results of their Making Algae Grow experiments and to make notes in the appropriate tables.

For information on the difference between food chains and food webs and the importance of algae in a food web, visit these two sites:

Before beginning this activity, make sure that students are familiar with the concept of food webs.

There are a number of different types of food webs within this activity and you can use all or some of them. We recommend that you navigate through each part before introducing to the students. The Food Web Matching Game can either be played online by the students as indicated within the procedures below, or you can print the Matching Game activity, make organism cards, laminate them, and have the students play the game in groups of four. The first part of the Cool Projects (Gone Fishing) site is a good resource. The link used by the students (the Food Web Challenge) is an excellent and challenging food web game.

Procedures

Explain to students that now that they have learned about some of the marine organisms that live in an ocean environment, they will be learning about how they interact with one another to create food webs.

Review what is meant by a food web. If your students have not created food webs before, then introduce this topic by creating a simple food web on the board and introduce the vocabulary words using the vocabulary in Coastal Ecosystem Curriculum: Food Web as a resource.

Food Web Matching Game:
a. Have students go to The Food Web Matching Game , and do a very simple marine food web activity. It is also linked from the Exploring Oceans Student Web Page.
b. Once students have been successful, have them draw a diagram of the finished food web. This drawing will be used at the end of Activity 5.

Before students begin the Food Web Challenge, ask them to write down in their own words the answers to the questions:

What are phytoplankton?
What is their role in the ocean food web

a. They can get help for answering these questions from three sources at the Cool Projects site (from which the Food Web Challenge is linked).They can get there from the Food Web Challenge link on the Exploring Oceans Student Web Page. Have them visit all three sources before answering the questions. Remind the students that their answers should be in their own words.
b. Have students listen to the interviews of Oscar Schofield and Mike Crowley if they haven’t already, and hear what they have to say.
c. Students can get additional information to add to their answers by scrolling to the top of Cool Projects (Gone Fishing) and clicking c.o.o.l tools (in the upper right hand side) and then selecting c.o.o.l cards to learn more from Oscar Schofield.

Food Web Challenge:
a. After the students have answered the questions, have them click the Food Web Challenge link and enjoy the game! Students will complete this game very quickly, but warn the students to Be Careful! In order to gain a perfect score, they have to place each organism in the correct spot AND the correct trophic level! Students may want to play the game more than once to improve their scores.
b. When all students have finished this game, discuss what made the game so difficult.

Homework

Have students complete the questions on The Food Web Matching Game – A Missing Link. They will need the pictures that they drew of the simple food web during the Food Web Matching Game part of this activity.

Resources used

Activity 4