In the last unit of science class, we have been working on ecology and the food chain/food web. For the final unit, we dissected owl pellets! Before we dissected owl pellets, we learned about the food chain and the food web! One thing that I really liked about the food chain was that (even if this is not a good thing) that if one animal went extinct, then all of the animals in its food group would die or overpopulate! Take a frog for example, if a frog died then the animal who eats it (snake) would die because it would have nothing to eat. Then the hawk would die and the fungi would overpopulate because of all the dead carcasses! But take it the other way and the grasshoppers would overpopulate because the frogs aren’t eating them, and then all the grass would die because of the insane amounts of grasshoppers. And one thing I liked about the food web is that when the food chain only shows one specific relationship between the animals (prey/predator), the food web shows the connections between many different species.
After that, when we dissected the owl pellets. In the beginning, everyone was a little freaked out because we were sticking wooden tools into regurgitated owl pellets, but then it turned out to be really cool! For example, our class (603) was the first class to find a bird skeleton inside the pellet! My group found a full vole skeleton, and another table found an intact fly and maggots inside the pellet.
I really liked our ecology unit because everything that we did was very exhilarating.
Georgia H. (6th grader)
