Useful words
Biodiversity – many different types of plants and animals.
Ecosystem – a community of living things and the environment they live in.
Habitat – place where plants and animals live.
Interdependence – depending on each other; connected.
Niche - the role of an organism within its natural environment, how it gets its energy (food) and how it lives.
Producer - a plant that makes its own energy from the sun through photosynthesis.
Consumer - animals are consumers because they cannot make their own energy.
Food Chain - an arrangement of organisms in a community according to which organism is eaten or eats another. Food chains always start with a plant (or plants).
Food Web - a system of food chains linked to one another.
Within Ō Tū Wharekai
A simple wetland food web is a good way to show interdependence in action:
- all the animals in this food web depend on each other
- each part of the food web is affected by the others
- conservation plays a big part in maintaining wetland ecosystems.
Between wetlands
- many birds migrate with the seasons between feeding and breeding grounds
- wetland birds like to migrate via wetlands. They use wetlands as stopping places
- draining or destroying wetlands upsets migration patterns.
