Producers, consumers, and decomposers, oh my! During SPREE’s School Break Camp Tangled in the Food Web, campers delved into local food webs and explored the puzzle connecting the sun, plants, animals, and decomposers. Chomper’s is an herbivore, who relies on plants to survive, but his friends Roxy the Racoon and Fiona the Fox are carnivores and omnivores. Do you know what that means about what they eat? Today, campers worked together to find out where each animal sits at the interconnected table of the food web.
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After a “Know, Wonder, Learn” brainstorm, campers learned about macroinvertebrates- animals without a backbone that we can see without a microscope- and got a chance to find some in the River at Critter Crawl. Thankfully, due to the warmer weather today, we were able to find all kind of critters, even though the water was still pretty chilly!
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During our second activity, we learned all about how food webs are interconnected through a name game involving a yarn web. When an animal no longer is in the ecosystem, like when an animal goes extinct, this can change the food web and even make it fall apart! After learning about food webs and types of consumers, the campers were able to witness the food web in action by dissecting an owl pellet. An owl pellet consists of all the indigestible material of an owl’s diet- like bones and fur. Campers found whole rodent skulls and many tiny bones that they got to take home. We ended the day enjoying the sunshine and perfect fall weather on the playground!
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