Living Together: How Organisms Interact with Their Ecosystems 🌿🐾

 

Hello Eco-Explorers! 🌎

Today we are learning how organisms (living things) interact with their ecosystems — the places where they live, grow, and survive.

1. Vocabulary:

Organisms: Any living thing, like a plant, animal, or even a tiny bacteria.

Ecosystem: a community where all the living things (plants, animals, bugs) in a particular area, along with the non-living things (water, rocks, sunlight, etc.), depend on each other to survive.

Habitat: A place where an organism lives and can find everything it needs to survive.

Abiotic: Describes the nonliving part of the environment, including water, rocks, light, and temperature.

Biotic: A living thing, such as a plant, an animal, a fungus, or a bacterium.

 

2. Examples of ecosystems:

Forest:

A forest has trees, rocks, birds, squirrels, bugs, and mushrooms - the trees provide shade and food for the animals while the animals help spread seeds.

 

Desert:

A very dry place with sand, rocks, cacti, and lizards where water is scarce.

 

Pond:

Think of a pond with frogs, fish, plants like lily pads, insects and rocks - they all depend on the water and each other to survive.

 

3. How do organisms interact?

There are 2 ways in which organisms interact with each other and their environments.

3.1. Biotic factors (living things), such as plants and animals depend on one another. For example, plants (producers) are eaten by rabbits. Rabbits are then eaten by foxes (consumers). When these animals poop or die, other little animals and plants feed on those (decomposers). The cycle starts again. This is called the food chain.

 

3.2: Living things (biotic factors), also depend on abiotic factors (nonliving things) found in their habitat to meet their needs. For instance, animals use rocks for shelter, water to drink, plants use the sunlight to do the photosynthesis. The photosynthesis creates oxygen that all living things breathe.

 

The table below shows some biotic and abiotic factors and how they are used by different kinds of organisms.

4. Food chain:

All living things need food to survive. A food chain shows how each living thing obtains food, and how energy and nutrients pass from creature to creature.

 

5. Elements of a food chain:

·       The SUN is the beginning of food chains. Almost all the energy used by living beings to survive on earth comes from the sun.

• Producers: Plants, which make their own food using sunlight (think of a tree making leaves). 
• Consumers: Animals that eat plants or other animals (like a rabbit eating grass). 
• Decomposers: Tiny organisms like bacteria and fungi that break down dead things and return nutrients to the soil. 

6. Food web:

 

Organisms in food chains don’t eat just one type of food. A food web shows how food chains overlap. In other words, it shows what eats what.

7. Energy:

Living things need a constant supply of energy. The sun provides that energy, which plants transform into food through photosynthesis.

Herbivores (animals that eat plants) eat plants and receive energy. When the herbivore is eaten by a carnivore (an animal that eats herbivores), the herbivore's energy is transferred to the carnivore. The transfer of energy from one organism to another constitutes a food chain.