Bird Food Web
|
|
Blue Q Owl Handy Tote $6.97 Hoo’s toting around the sweetest little bag? Owl let you figure out hoo. You. That’s hoo. 8.5″w x 10.5″h x 4″d”. 95% recycled woven polypropylene…. |
|
|
Hand-Feeding and Raising Baby Birds: Breeding, Hand-Feeding, Care, and Management $7.93 This book is for both amateur bird owners and professional breeders. It offers instructions on maintaining a bird nursery, keeping it heated and sanitary, and tending the chicks. Differing feed formulas are given for different species, including parrots, doves, finches, soft-billed birds, pheasants, and others. Advice pertains to correcting problems often suffered by baby birds, from dehydration a… |
|
|
Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound $42.52 Get ready for the most ground breaking entry to date in the best-selling Birdsongs series (more than 400,000 copies sold!). Birdscapes delivers an immersive birding experience never before seen, or heard in any book. For the eyes: seven elaborately engineered, full-color pop-ups portraying dozens of bird species in diverse North American habitats, from the Alaskan Tundra to a Southeast swamp. For … |
|
|
Horseshoe Crabs and Shorebirds: The Story of a Food Web $3.77 Each spring, hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs crawl from the bottom of Delaware Bay to lay billions of pearly green eggs on the beaches. Their salty eggs provide a feast for scavenging coastal animals, but billions more are eaten by the flocks of shorebirds that stop to rest and feed each spring after flying north from their homes in South America. In recent years the horseshoe crab popula… |
|
|
Topics Entertainment Presents: Dinosaurs $4.97 Millions of years ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth. Now, prehistory repeats itself with TOPICS Presents Dinosaurs, the most engaging, informative, and imaginative journeyback in time since the Mesozoic Era. From the Albertosaurus to the Velociraptor; the Triassic Period to the Cretaceous, these 4 CD-ROMs spirit you to the wondrous time when these ancient creatures dominated the landscape, charting t… |
|
|
Tosh.0 301 $1.99 … |
|
|
Roudybush Maintenance 22oz-50Lbs. Bird Parrot Food starting @ $13.99 a bag $15.99 |
|
|
Roudybush Maintenance 22oz-50Lbs. Bird Parrot Food starting @ $13.99 a bag $20.99 |
Science for Kids (2 of 3). The Challenge of Teaching Young Children About Food Chains. by Hannah McCarthy
Over-simplification is a danger in science education. While over-simplification might get the point across, it can imprint on the young student a false knowledge that can remain for a long time. This impression in turn can cause resistance in later learning when future instruction may paint a different and more complex picture of the world. Food chains are a good case in point and I will try to explain the pit falls in simplified instruction.
Text books or the internet will often show a thrush feeding on an aphid, a snake on a rat, or a badger eating a snake. These are all unusual behaviours for these creatures, only possible in exceptional circumstances. The broader picture is that most animals are opportunists and will eat food that is easy to obtain and ideally needs the minimum of effort and danger. The limited amount of energy obtainable from very small prey, such as an aphid, means that only small birds such as blue tits will find it economic to forage for them. This fuller explanation is more satisfactory because it gives a sense of energy spent versus gained. In addition, the physical structures of an animal, in this case the bird’s beak and weight, will also point to the general diet of the creature. And what is meant by a ‘snake’ which can be any of nearly 2,800 species, all with their own range of habitats and diets. ‘Snake’ is a meaningless designation. Only by explaining these finer points, does a food chain make sense.
The second fundamental error in dealing with food chains is that very few diets are so restricted as to make all levels of hunter and prey both linear and singular. It ignores the variety, thus creating a web rather than a chain. In addition there is the factor of the variability of this food web over geography and time, such as periods of drought. In such times of stress, carnivores often eat carrion, because it is plentiful; similarly, some creatures, such as crocodiles, will turn to cannibalism on the point of starvation.
The third misconception created by the concept of food chains is the suggestion that the creature eats the same food throughout its independent life. Juveniles of many creatures eat a different set of food to their adult counterparts, often determined by their size and, in the case of carnivores, their level of hunting ability. Showing food chains in diagrams can become problematic; the essence is providing notes to highlight these variables.
Food chain theory is a good introduction to other branches of biological sciences and can often be taught together to highlight these other factors that are part of ecosystems. Ecosystems are determined by physical as well as biological factors and each living creature in that environment has its own impact on the relationships. Ecosystems are not exact; they often blend gradually into other habitats, such as forest to savannah. Over time most ecosystems alter or ‘mature’, such as the succession of dominant tree species in an undisturbed forest, leading to a ‘climax community’. All creatures need to be suited and adapted to thrive in that environment because each ecosystem has its own set of physical and biological factors. Ecosystems determine the creatures’ position in the food chain within that environment. Some animals and plants can inhabit a range of ecosystems, and in the long term, this can lead to new species arising, providing populations that are isolated from each other. So, the bigger theories and ideas starting from food chains can lead to an understanding of ecology which in turn can lead to the introduction of adaptation and evolution.
The last in this series of three articles will focus on the challenge of teaching young learners in the digital age when, on average, student spends six hours per day in front of the screen. The impact of this will be explored including underestimating young learners’ passively acquired knowledge.
Hannah McCarthy is Education City’s schools marketing manager. Education City develops online teaching resources, which offer curriculum-based Key Stage 1 science , worksheets and interactive whiteboard resources.
Article Source: http://www.earticlesonline.com/Article/Science-for-Kids–2-of-3—-The-Challenge-of-Teaching-Young-Children-About-Food-Chains-/873600