About This Lesson
Use this lesson when teaching food chains, food webs, energy flow, ecosystem interactions, human impacts on
ecosystems, marine debris, or plastic pollution in the Gulf of Mexico.
Students participate in an interactive Gulf of Mexico food-chain simulation to investigate how organisms depend on one
another for food and energy. Students first model normal feeding relationships among producers and consumers and then
discover that plastic pollution has entered their simulated ecosystem.
The activity demonstrates an important difference between energy moving through a food chain and plastic being
transferred among organisms. Energy originates with the Sun, is captured by producers, and moves to consumers when
organisms eat other organisms. Plastic does not provide usable food energy. Instead, plastic debris can be accidentally
ingested by organisms and may sometimes be transferred to predators when contaminated prey are eaten.
Students will use evidence from the simulation to explain how plastic pollution introduced into one part of an ecosystem can
potentially affect organisms at multiple trophic levels.
