Our first week together, we learned about biomes and how the temperature and moisture relationships affected the plants and animals able to thrive in each location. Now that we've surveyed the spectrum of life, you should be able to appreciate that these organisms do not survive independently of each other, but are intimately intwined in what scientists call "food webs". These webs can be visualized in different ways, and can be very complex. In fact, they are typically so complex that even the most complex drawing doesn't do them justice. I have picked out two examples for you to look at briefly. The first is of a desert food web, presented to my nephew at a Junior Ranger Program at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in Southern California. The second is of a grassland food web. There will not be any test questions from these, so just look at them and marvel at their interrelationships.
Here are two final animations (Audio - Important) about:
food chains and
food webs.
Let's end our brief survey of life with this famous passage that Charles Darwin wrote at the conclusion of The Origin of Species: "It is interesting to comtemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by the laws acting around us... There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."