Ecosystems 🐫🏜️

Question 1

What is an ecosystem?

Answer 1

All biotic parts and the abiotic parts of an area

Question 2

What are the organisms called in an ecosystem?

Answer 2

• producers: use sunlight to make food ☀️
• consumer: gets energy by eating other organisms (eat producers or consumers) 🐆
• decomposer: organism gets its energy by breaking down dead material and dead consumers e.g. bacteria 🦠 and fungi 🍄

Question 3

What happens in the nutrient cycle?

Answer 3

• dead material decomposes, nutrients are released into the soil
• nutrients are taken up from soil by plants. Plants may be eaten by consumers
• when plants or consumers die, nutrients are returned to the soil
• transfer of nutrients is called nutrient cycling

Question 4

What does a food chain show?

Answer 4

What eats what

For example:
Berry 🍓 —> bird 🐦—> hawk 🦅
—> = eaten by

Question 5

What does a food web show?

Answer 5

Lots of food chains and how they overlap (interlinked)

Question 6

What would happen if one part of the food web went extinct?

Answer 6

Each part of an ecosystem depend on other parts
If one part changes, it affects all other parts

For example, the extinction of a producer means all other species would decline due to lack of food for the primary consumers and therefore for the tertiary consumer