Content Outline for Teaching - Potosi School District - Home

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Section 3
Content Outline
for Teaching
Ecology
Energy Through the Ecosystem
Underlined words and
phrases are to be filled
in by students on the
Note-taking Worksheet.
A. Energy moves through an ecosystem in the form of food.
1. An organism that makes its own food, such as a plant, is called a producer.
2. Consumers, like grasshoppers, eat other organisms.
3. Decomposers,such as bacteria and fungi, use dead organisms and the waste
material of other organisms for food.
B. A food chain models how energy from food passes from one organism to
another.
1. In an ecosystem, food chains often overlap.
2. A food web is a series of overlapping food chains that shows all the possible
feeding relationships in an ecosystem.
C. In an ecosystem, matter cycles through food chains.
1. The amount of matter on Earth never changes.
2. Matter in ecosystems is recycled.
Discussion Question
Name the producers, consumers, and decomposers in the following list of organisms: a hawk,
a grasshopper, a field mouse, grass, and a fungus. What are the feeding relationships among
these organisms? The grass is a producer; the hawk, field mouse, and grasshopper are consumers;
the fungus is a decomposer. The grasshopper eats the grass, the field mouse eats the grasshopper,
the hawk eats the field mouse.
Ecology 71