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Grade 4 Science · World 3: Food Web Forest · Level 22
Too Few, Too Many
Use data to predict what happens in a web when something becomes scarce, extinct, or over-abundant.
Warm-up, learn, try it together, practice, then a quick check. About 15 minutes.
What children learn in Level 22
- What happens when a living thing becomes scarce, meaning there are very few, or extinct, meaning gone forever? Or over-abundant, meaning far too many?
- Look at the web. If the rabbits became scarce, the foxes and owls would have less food. But the grass would probably grow thicker, since less is being eaten.
- Scientists count populations year by year. In this made-up forest, when the rabbits dropped, the foxes dropped soon after.
- Real Georgia example: American chestnut trees once covered the mountains. A disease made them scarce in the early 1900s, and animals lost a big food source.
- Over-abundant matters too. Too many deer can eat nearly every young tree, and kudzu can smother whole forest edges.
Georgia Standards of Excellence in Science:
- S4L1.d — Use printed and digital data to develop a model illustrating and describing changes to the flow of energy in an ecosystem when plants or animals become scarce, extinct or over-abundant.