About This Lesson
Use this lesson when teaching food chains, food webs, energy flow, predator-prey relationships, ecosystems, habitats, or
Texas Gulf Coast ecology.
This lesson uses organisms that students may encounter in their local environment to make food chains more relevant and
place based. For students along the Texas Gulf Coast, local bays, estuaries, wetlands, marshes, and other coastal habitats
provide excellent examples of interconnected food chains.
Students investigate how energy moves through a local ecosystem beginning with the Sun and producers and continuing
through consumers. They also examine the important role of decomposers and detritivores in returning nutrients to the
ecosystem.
Rather than treating organisms as belonging to one fixed level of a food chain, students investigate how feeding
relationships can be more complex. Many animals consume several types of food, may be eaten by multiple predators, and
can occupy different positions within a food web depending on their age, size, or available food.
Students apply their knowledge by constructing and explaining a food chain using organisms from a local habitat.
