Food Chains

This term in our science lessons we are learning about animals and their habitats. Into this sequence of lessons we have chosen to incorporate part of 'animals, including humans'; specifically, designing and interpreting a variety of food chains.
 
We linked our new learning to that which the children learned about in KS1 about food chains but expanded upon this knowledge to also refer to the organisms in the food chain as either a producer or a primary (secondary, tertiary...) consumer as well as naming each level of the food chain using the scientific vocabulary of 'trophic'.
 
Expanding on this knowledge further, we looked at a food web to see how each food chain is interlinked into a food web and the predator at the top (a great white shark in this instance) is the 'apex predator' and that many different animals may eat the same producer. However, we also discovered that whilst a food chain and a food web show you the relationship between groups of organisms, it does not tell you how many animals are involved. For example, in the food web we investigated, there would be 25 great white sharks, 1,100 clown fish and 15,000 algae. We went outside to represent this on the yard using a scale of 1mm : 100 organisms. Using our maths skills to demonstrate our mastery and application of measurement, we drew a pyramid of numbers to show just how many algae there needs to be to support only 25 sharks!