1. The Story of Carbon Cycling Through an Environment Read the story together and use it to answer questions at the end.

2. Buffalo lived on the grasslands of East Africa for many years. One day he died of old age. He fell to his knees, then rolled heavily onto the ground. The little white cattle egrets fluttered away to look for insects where it was safer.

3. Soon, Hyena arrived and ate some Buffalo meat. Every living being has a lot of carbon in its body, so the meat that hyena ate had a lot of carbon atoms in it. BuffaloHyena Carbon

4. Buffalo's meat gave Hyena wonderful energy, enough so that she could hunt and kill a zebra by herself. But Hyena had to keep rushing at those pesky vultures to keep them from her kill, and after awhile she was very tired and panting. Her tongue was hanging out. Meanwhile, inside her body, a carbon atom from Buffalo's meat had become part of a cell in Hyena's hardworking leg muscles. To get more energy, Hyena's muscles had to "burn" (or metabolize) food. The molecule with that carbon atom was food, so when Hyena's blood flowed through her muscles with a fresh load of oxygen for oxidizing food, that carbon atom combined with two oxygen atoms and formed a carbon dioxide molecule. As the blood traveled back to Hyena's lungs, it took the carbon dioxide with it, and Hyena, who was still panting, breathed the carbon dioxide out into the air. BuffaloHyenaAir Carbon

5. A few minutes later Acacia Tree breathed the carbon dioxide molecule into a leaf. Inside the leaf, photosynthesis was going on. The leaf was making food for Acacia to grow. The leaf broke open the carbon dioxide molecule. It used the carbon atom and some hydrogen atoms to build a sugar molecule (food), and exhaled the oxygen from the carbon dioxide back into the air. BuffaloHyenaAir Tree Carbon

6. Maybe that leaf fell off Acacia and blew into the Nile River, and was decomposed there by bacteria, freeing the carbon atom. Then, the carbon atom was carried into the Mediterranean Sea. BuffaloHyenaAir Tree Bacteria Sea Carbon

7. Then, a microscopic plankton protozoan (a foram) used the carbon to build its amazing shell. When the foram died, its shell sank slowly to the seafloor with millions of other tiny shells. All the stuff that sinks to the seafloor is called sediment. After thousands and thousands of years all that sediment was so squeezed together by weight and time that it turned into a sedimentary rock called limestone. BuffaloHyenaAir Tree Bacteria Sea Carbon Foram Carbon Rock

8. Over time water dissolves the limestone and releases the carbon into the atmosphere where it could be used again by plants. BuffaloHyenaAir Tree Bacteria Sea Carbon Foram Carbon Rock Carbon Released into environment

9. BuffaloHyena Air Sea Bacteria Tree Foram Rock Released into the atmosphere

10. When we inhale, we breathe in Oxygen. When we exhale, we breathe out Carbon and Oxygen as Carbon Dioxide. Where do we get the Carbon from?

11. What do plants use the Carbon for after they inhale Carbon Dioxide?

12. List three things that could happen to the carbon found in an animal after it dies.

13. Challenge Question: What happened to all of the Carbon that was in the bodies of the dinosaurs?

14. In groups of 3 or 4 create a readers theater which tells a different story of carbon recycling using animals, plants, and other materials that are found in America.