Greetings, my fellow APES!
This is Will logging on to give you a brief rundown of what this past week looked like in Ms. Bergeron's class. We kicked the week off talking about food chains and food webs and how they are read and interpreted, and we even did an activity outside in which we drew our own food webs with sidewalk chalk! We discussed endangered/invasive species and their impact on the ecosystem as well. We also touched on energy transfer among organisms and the different trophic levels, but I'll let Cameron cover that in her post! The activity that I want to talk about; the one that interested me the most, was the exhibition of competition that we witnessed firsthand between Ms. B's two leopard geckos!
Ms. B has two leopard geckos as her classroom pets, and we all got to gather around the terrarium to watch as she fed them on Friday! She released a bagful (about 20) of crickets into the midst of the two reptiles, and boy did they go to work! All the students were transfixed as Pablo and Sanchez gobbled up the little insects almost effortlessly. However, this feeding frenzy did not come without a few scuffles between the two girls, but they were quickly resolved by a poke or two from the students. Both geckos ate at least 7 or 8 crickets before they had their fill, and by then there were hardly any left!
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| "the students were transfixed" |
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| "gobbled up the insects almost effortlessly" |
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| "a few scuffles between the girls" |
We had discussed the ways that species interact within ecosystems and how they eat and transfer energy between themselves, but the geckos really helped bring the lesson full circle. We understood that different species have different niches, and that they interact in different ways (be it competition, mutualism, paratism, commensalism, etc.), but seeing it for ourselves allowed us to truly grasp the concept. In our guided reading activity with the online textbook we also learned about the competitive exclusion principal which states that if two competitors try to occupy the same realized niche, one will eliminate the other. Thankfully, however, we were able to keep the two from fighting extensively, but the few altercations they had definitely evidenced the possibility of such a fate!
On the whole, I thought it was an awesome week full of fun and activities through which we learned a lot about how organisms interact within different ecosystems, among other things. I really enjoyed the geckos, but I guess that's just because I love animals! Anyhow, that's all from me this week! I hope y'all enjoyed my post and be sure to check out Cameron's as well! Also, below is a link to the chapter about ecosystems in the online book, as well as one to a cool video I find about symbiotic relationships...enjoy!
Adios!
I like the video :) Clownfish are my favorite!
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