TEACHERS: This would be an great place to show a video clip from Disney's, "The Lion King." Use the clip where Mufasa discusses with Simba the circle of life. (Be sure to follow established district copyright policies.)

A food web is a model that shows all the possible feeding relationships between organisms living in an ecosystem.

You can see that a food web is much more complex than a food chain. A food web is actually several food chains joined together. Because most organisms depend on more than one species for food, food webs are more accurate models than food chains.

When you learned about food chains, you learned that organisms, can be classified as producers; first, second, or third order consumers; or decomposers. Another way to classify a consumer is by what it eats. Herbivores eat only plants, carnivores eat only meat, and omnivores eat both plants and meat.

Name one herbivore, carnivore and omnivore from the food web above.

Create your own food web.

• Use some old issues of nature type magazines (ex. National Geographic, Field and Stream, Outdoor Life).
  
• Find and cut out 8 or 9 pictures of plants, animals, and or decomposers that could be living together in one ecosystem.
  
• Paste the pictures on a sheet of white paper.
  
• Draw arrows connecting the plants and animals to show feeding relationships.
  • Be sure your arrows are pointing in the direction that the energy flows.
    
• Label each organism as a producer, herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore.

Safety concerns:

Teachers and students, be sure to keep all Sharp Instrument Safety Rules that are specified by your teacher and in all general laboratory experiences.