What is a food chain?

Unit Standards 5.L.4B.1 Analyze and Interpret data to explain how organisms obtain their energy and classify organisms as producers, consumers (including herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore), or decomposers (such as Fungi, Bacteria insects and molds). 5.L.4B.2 Develop and use models of food chains and food webs to describe the flow of energy in an ecosystem. 5.L.4B.3 Construct explanations for how organisms interact with each other in an ecosystem (including predators and prey, and parasites and hosts). 5.L.4B.4 Construct scientific arguments to explain how limiting factors (including food, water, space, and shelter) or newly introduced organisms can affect an ecosystem.

What is a food chain? Living things need energy to live and grow. Energy is passed from the sun to the plant to the insect to the bird.

What is a food chain? Food chain- shows how energy passes from one organism to another as food

What is a food chain? Producers- organisms that make their own food

What is a food chain? Consumers- organisms that cannot make their own food; they must consume other organisms for food.

What is a food chain? Most food chains are similar in a few ways. Sunlight is at the beginning of nearly all food chains. A plant, or producer, is next in the chain. Then, an animal eats the plant. Next, an animal eats the plant eater. The chain continues until tiny living things break down dead organisms and return nutrients to the soil.

What is a food chain?

What is a food chain? The nutrients they return to the soil are used by new plants, and the chain begins again.

What is a food chain? With each step of the food chain, matter and energy pass from one organism to another. Because organisms use most of the energy in food to live and grow, only a small amount of energy is passed from organism to organism.