Week 5- Ecosystems

 Learning This Week:

This week I learned about ecology and the impacts that ecosystems have on different species. Ecology is the study of the relationships living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. We discusses the similarities of biomes, habitats, and ecosystems. Biomes are described as large areas that have similar climate conditions and similar dominant types of plants and animals. During lecture we discussed the six main biomes of our planet: Desert, Forest, Grassland, Tundra, Marine, and Freshwater. Habitats are specific places where a particular community of organisms live, these take place inside of the six biomes. An ecosystem is a community of living and nonliving things that interact with each other in a specific environment. For example, we can study a specific lake that is a habitat for many species. We can look at how water temperature, community of fish, humans, pollution, etc. all play a role in this ecosystem. Finally, we discussed food chains and food webs. Starting with producers such as grass, flowers, weeds, who get consumed by a primary consumer such as monarch butterflies. The butterfly is then consumed by a secondary consumer such as a robin. Finally, the robin is consumed by a tertiary consumer such as a fox. During each level of consumption, only 10% of energy is actually retained, meaning the higher you go up on the food chain, the more the specie has to eat. Apex predators only get about .1% of the original energy. 

Update on Fast Plants

Application to Future Teaching: 

This weeks learning will be applied to my future teaching through discussions of ecology. As I was working on the Week 5 NGSS Unit Development, I chose to dig deeper into growth and development of organisms. I looked at the life cycle of a bullfrog and found a book that discusses the four stages of the life cycle, the frogs food chain, and how the living and nonliving factors affect the frogs environment. I enjoyed engaging in this lesson plan development activity and having the opportunity to apply my learning from class to a future lesson that I can teach. We also created a Jamboard of a specific biome that we researched and looked closely at a food chain. This is a fun and interactive activity that I can incorporate with my future students. I also liked the challenge where one aspect of our food chain was taken away and we had to look how it would affect the rest of the species in the environment. 

Example of a food chain in the Marine Biome. 

Questions for Further Study

1.) When a specie goes extinct, how does that affect the rest of the food chain within the ecosystem? 

2.) If a specie is removed from its ecosystem (for the zoo or for other environment factors that causes them to move) how does that affect their growth and development?