Summary
The brothers turn the African savanna into a giant board game to understand food chains — tracing the flow of energy from the sun through grasses to termites, gazelles, cheetahs, and lions. When a piece goes missing the whole chain shakes, showing why every link in the web of life matters.
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Teaching resources
Discussion questions
Discussion
A food chain is really a food web — energy flows from the sun through plants to every animal in the ecosystem.
- Where does the energy in a food chain originally come from? How does it get into the grass?
- What happens to energy each time it moves from one organism to the next? Does all of it pass on?
- If one link in the food chain was removed — say, all the gazelles disappeared — what might happen to the cheetahs? To the grass? Why does removing one animal affect so many others?
Quick work-a-long
Vocabulary: producer, consumer, predator, prey, food web, energy transfer.
Try it: Draw a three-link savanna food chain (plant → herbivore → carnivore). Then add one more arrow to show another animal that eats the herbivore — you've just made a food web.