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5-8 Activities

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5-8 Activities: The Food Chain

The animals of the Okavango—crocodiles and cheetahs, lechwes and pangolins, hippos and wild dogs—compete to survive. All need water. All need to eat. What do they eat? Herbivores eat plants. Some carnivores eat the animals that eat the plants, and some eat other carnivores. Omnivores eat both plants and animals. The network of dependence between animals and plants of the Okavango, or any ecosystem, is called the food chain.

Spinning a Food Web

Divide your students into groups of 6 to 12 and ask the groups to form circles. Each student in a circle will play the part of an animal found in the Okavango Delta or the grass and trees which some of the animals eat. Animals could include the lechwe, pangolin, termite, wild dog, cheetah, hippopotamus, or crocodile. Begin with a ball of yarn and a student pretending to be the grass. Have the student hold one end and toss the ball to an animal that would eat the grass, stating “grass” and the animal eating it. For example, “Grass is eaten by lechwe.” Then that student might say “Lechwe is eaten by crocodile.” and toss the ball to a student playing a crocodile, while still holding on to part of the yarn. This continues until the end of the food chain. The top carnivore reverses the order, tossing the yarn to an animal that it would hunt. Soon all of the students end up holding part of the yarn, illustrating both individual food chains and the interconnection of chains into a food web.

Begin again, this time with a selection of plants and animals found near your school. This can lead to a class discussion of how fragile the chains are and how disturbing one species in an ecosystem can affect many other plants or animals, directly and indirectly.

Never Break the Chain

Create a card game with your students. Make cards with the names and pictures of animals found in the Okavango Delta, as well as grass, trees, and decaying logs. You can print the pictures to color here online or have students sketch their own. Students can create a food chain one card at a time. Give each student an equal number of cards and place one face up where all can see it. Taking turns, students can place one of their cards on the pile or they can pass. If they place a card on another that would not be adjacent in a food chain (such as one plant on another, or a carnivore on a plant), however, then they must pick up all the cards in the pile. Some valid chains include grass to lechwe to crocodile and decaying log to termite to pangolin to wild dog. The first student to place his or her last card wins.

Help your class create a game for the playground or gym in which each student plays an animal that can be tagged only by animals that would hunt it. After the students pick their animals, divide them into groups to make rules about whom their animal can hunt and who can hunt their animal. Then have the groups explain their rules to the class. For example, students playing pangolins might curl up to avoid being tagged. One cheetah or one crocodile could tag a lechwe, but it might take two wild dogs. Crocodiles could tag a wild dog but not a hippopotamus. After your students try out their game, have them teach it to a class of younger students.

Disturbing the Chain

Have students build food chains as discussed above. Then have them remove one member of each chain. What would happen? If the pangolin disappeared, for example, the termite population might go up due to fewer predators while the wild dog population might decrease due to lack of food. (Or the dogs might eat more lechwes, posing more competition for the crocodiles.) Then ask your students to consider food chains among animals that live near your school as well. Have them discuss ways in which humans have affected food chains.

Animal Tales

Have your students write a short story about one of the animals of the Okavango. You could suggest a day in the life of the animal, a diary, an interview, even a play. The story should describe the animal’s habitat and mention encounters with prey, predators, or both.


 
©1996 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.
 

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