This activity will help students understand food chains and food webs in the ocean. After studying the materials provided, students will play a food web game, in which they are given a blank food web and the names of the organisms. Students place the organisms in their correct places on the food web so that the arrows indicate the direction of energy flow. As a follow-up, students decide what would ... Full description.

In this activity, students construct a food web of Antarctic organisms. Working from a trophic table that provides information about each organisms's role in the food web, they will attempt to place them in their correct positions on a blank food web chart. Links to a glossary are embedded in the text. Full description.

In this activity, students investigate the question "What influences fish populations in the ocean?", by exploring the role of phytoplankton in a marine food web and how physical factors in the environment affect living communities. They interview scientists and form a hypothesis, collect and analyze data, and prepare an article for a ficticious magazine. Links are provided to teachers' tips, and ... Full description.

This reference provides a brief description of marine food webs. It presents food web terminology, explains the relationship between food chains and food webs, and introduces the concept of microbial loops. Full description.

This extension activity challenges students to answer hypothetical questions about a marine food web they have created. They are asked to hypothesize what might happen if a top predator like the killer whale became extinct, or if fish from the middle levels of the web were overfished, or if a primary producer such as algae were removed from the web. Full description.

This collection of maps and graphs provides information on the locations of breeding colonies, distributions of biomass, seasonal species density, and deposition graphs for seabird and shorebird species of the central California coast. Full description.

This histogram shows the seasonal abundance of marine mammals in Monterey Bay. Full description.

This site explains how to use evidence from fossils to understand the ecology of ancient organisms. Fossils provide clues and together abiotic and biotic factors combine to form complete ecosystems, each with its own unique ecology and history. Predator and prey relationships and dispersal are used as examples to show how fossils can also tell us about biotic factors, such as what organisms are present ... Full description.

This curriculum focuses on the coastal ecosystem in the Gulf of the Farallones, in the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco Bay. One goal of this curriculum is to teach about the natural connections in this ecosystem and how humans fit into it. Topics include the seasonal upwelling of ocean water, the feeding relationships among organisms in the open water, the sandy beach habitat along the shoreline, ... Full description.

This reference provides an overview of the three zones into which the ocean can be divided based on the amount of light recieved: the sunlit (or euphotic) zone, the twilight (or disphotic) zone, and the midnight (or aphotic) zone. The descriptions are accompanied by diagrams and a brief listing of the organisms that live in each zone. Full description.