Activity: Earthworm Food Chain

Activity: Earthworm Food Chain

Materials:

Paper copies

Scissors

Tape

Procedure:

1.  Students are going to make a paper chain showing how earthworms fit into the food chain.

2.  Give each student a copy of the animal sheets. There are two, make sure they get one of each.

3.  Have them color the animals and add details as necessary.

4.  Have the students cut the animals into strips.

5.  Starting with the worm strip, have the students make a loop.

6.  NOW! Have students decide what animals would eat the worm. Link those animals through the worm link.

7.  Have students decide what might eat the secondary animals. Add to the chain.

8.  The sun and plant are there in case you want to extend the activity to show that worms make dirt and plants grow in the dirt and are helped by the sun.

9.  Eventually what you want to end up with is a series of short chains radiating out from the worm. Some possible combinations are:

Worm – bird – cat

Worm - frog – large bird

Worm – lizrd – bird – big bird

Worm – lizard – big lizard – bird – big bird

Worm – lizard - raccoon

Worm – lizard - owl

Worm – bird – raccoon

Background:

A food web is a set of interconnected food chains by which energy and materials circulate within an ecosystem. The food web is divided into two broad categories: the grazing web, which typically begins with green plants, algae, or photosynthesizing plankton, and the detrital web, which begins with organic debris. These webs are made up of individual food chains. In a grazing web, materials typically pass from plants to plant eaters (herbivores) to flesh eaters (carnivores). In a detrital web, materials pass from plant and animal matter to bacteria and fungi (decomposers), then to detrital feeders (detritivores), and then to their predators (carnivores).

Generally, many interconnections exist within food webs. For example, the fungi that decompose matter in a detrital web may sprout mushrooms that are consumed by squirrels, mice, and deer in a grazing web. Robins are omnivores, that is, consumers of both plants and animals, and thus are in both detrital and grazing webs. Robins typically feed on earthworms, which are detritivores that feed upon decaying leaves.

Worms are any soft-bodied animal, usually small and often elongated lacking well-developed limbs. The term does not refer to any particular animal group, but is applied to many unrelated invertebrates or their larvae and to a few vertebrates. The familiar earthworm burrows in soil and feeds on dead materials, extracting organic matter from the soil. This moderately complex animal has a complete digestive tract and a circulatory system.