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Maintaining BiodiversityActivity for Kids

Food Web Model DIY

Duration: 20-30 min
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: $0 to $10

Learn how to make a model of a food web and see what happens when one living thing is removed!

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Material List

15Paper or Plastic Cups
1Roll of Scotch Tape
1Sheet of images of living things
1Pair of Scissors

Instructions

1Cut out the images and tape them on the cups.
2Use the cups to show where each organism gets its energy from. For example, grass gets its energy from the sun, the ant gets its energy by eating the grass, the lizard gets its energy by eating the ant, the snake gets its energy by eating the lizard, and the eagle gets its energy by eating the snake.
3To build the food web (which shows where each organism in the ecosystem gets its energy from), stack the labeled cups on top of one another, starting with the plants and going upward until you get to the apex predator (the eagle).
4To show what happens when one living thing is removed from the food web, take out one of the cups. You will see that the food web collapses.

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How It Works

When you remove one of the cups, the food web collapses. Ecosystems can collapse due to one living thing dying out. This is why it is important to maintain biodiversity in an ecosystem. Each organism has a role to play. This was shown in the video with the starfish example, removal of the starfish from the ecosystem caused it to collapse. Ecosystems are especially important because humans rely on healthy ecosystems for food, medicine, and clean water.