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Animal Adaptations
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Overarching Question: How do you design a zoo enclosure that reflects the animal’s natural ecosystem?
Guiding Questions
How do you collect and organize data from a field investigation on animal behavior?
Video of students eating lunch
Ethologist, a scientist that studies animal behavior, catagorizes behaviors and records them in a data table called at ethogram.
What is an adaptation and how does this help with an organism's success and survival?
Animal Adaptation Reading
Animal Adaptation Cornell Notes
How can you back up your conclusions with evidence from text, mathematical data, and observations?
What is the relationship between skull shape and what the animal eats?
Teeth Function
Measuring a skull
Primate Diets
What was Jane Goodall's impact on the world?
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What is the difference between a population, community and ecosystem?
Organisms find these needs in their habitat
- Food
- Water
- Space
- A place to reproduce
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Description |
Example |
| Population |
One type of organism living in the same habitat |
A herd of deer |
| Community |
More then one type of organism living in the same habitat |
Deer, trees, insects, bacteria, mushrooms, wolves , flowers |
| Ecosystem |
The living and nonliving things in a habitat |
Deer, trees, insects, bacteria, mushrooms, wolves , flowers, sun, lake, soil, rocks, rain, snow, heat |
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| Fill In Venn Diagram that compares and contrasts Population, Community, and Ecosystem |
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What are the roles of producer, consumer, and decomposer?
Every organism also has a niche in its habitat. A niche is an organisms job or what the organism does in the habitat. No two organisms have the same niche.
Some niche's include
Predator: An animal that eats another animal.
Prey: The animal that gets eaten
Producer: An orgainsm that gets its energy from the sun, such as a plant.
Consumer: An animal that eats another animal for energy and nutrients, they are at 3 levels.
Primary Consumer: An animal that eats a producer (plant).
Secondary Consumer: An animal that eats a primary consumer.
Tirtiary Consumer: An animal that eats a secondary consumer.
Decomposer: An organism that gets its energy and nutrients from dead organisms and turns them into soil, such as fungi and bacteria.
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How does energy move through a food web?
All the food chains in a habitat are put together in a food web to show how the food chains overlap. Energy starts with the sun, then goes to plants and then consumers. |
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The energy pyramid tell us two things about how energy moves in an ecosystem:
1. In an ecosystem the producers have the most energy and the amount of energy goes down as you move up the pyramid, the tertiary consumers have the least amount of energy in an ecosystem.
2. The producers in an ecosystem have the largest population and the size of the population goes down as you move up the pyramid, the tertiary consumers have the smallest population in an ecosystem.
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How do animal interact in your ecosystem?
See Animal Wiki task 1-3 for more details
Minnesota DNR Ecosystems: Facts about ecosystems
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What are some adaptations for your animal?
See Animal Wiki task 4 for more details
Use these Links as your research your animal:
Minnesota DNR Animals: Facts about Minnesota Animals
Minnesota Zoo: A-Z list of animal facts.
Toads and Frogs
The Raptor Center
The International Wolf Center
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