Ecosystem Patterns Inquiry Lab

Middle School Inquiry Lab on Ecosystem Patterns

In this lab students will compare the interactions of organisms by researching a northern forest ecosystem. They will then compare the roles of that ecosystem to the roles of another to predict organism relationships.

Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:

• How can we predict the ways organisms will interact with each other in different ecosystems?

BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:

Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.

Materials List:

• Internet

PROCEDURE:

For this inquiry lab, students will start off by conducting research on the types of relationships that occur within a Northern Forest ecosystem. Next, students will use a table to fill in whether relationships between organisms are producer/consumer, predator/prey, or parasite/host. Students will also label if the relationship role is symbiotic parasitism, commensalism, or mutualism. Finally, students take the information they recorded on the table and try to detect a pattern within the Northern Forest ecosystem to identify the same patterns in a Hot Desert Ecosystem.

CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:

At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here are a few that come with the lab:

• On what did you base your predictions for the hot desert organisms?
• Why would the relationship between pollinators and flowers be the same in multiple ecosystems?
• What is a symbiotic relationship?
• List the three basic types of symbiotic relationships.
• Describe:
  • a competitive relationship you found:
  • a predator-prey relationship you found:
  • a symbiotic relationship you found:

CONCLUSION

Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:

1. If fruit trees exist in an ecosystem, what kind of organisms would you expect to find? Why?
2. Mountain lions are carnivores, not omnivores, that live in the desert. Would they fit into the patterns of the northern forest ecosystems? Why or why not?

MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS

All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.

 

STANDARDS ALIGNMENT

NGSS: MS LS 2-2 – Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.