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Lead Tests in the Condor Program

Grade 6 life science: a zoo's condor health checks and treatment records show how lead affects the digestive, circulatory, nervous, muscular and excretory systems.

Grade 6ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-LS1-3

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
10 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 6
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use health-check data to argue that the body is a system of interacting subsystems.
Students explain how harm to one kind of cell or tissue can affect organs and whole organ systems.

How to use

Read the passage together and point out the crop, the kidneys and the nerves before students start. Students can answer the table questions on their own and discuss the open response in pairs.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-LS1-3

Argue how the body is a system of interacting subsystems, from cells to tissues, organs and organ systems.

Preview

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Name Date

Lead Tests in the Condor Program

Use condor health checks to argue that body systems depend on each other.

The fall health checks

Read the passage and study the health-check table. Then answer questions 1–5.

Condors, Carcasses and Blood Tests

1Sadie Lindqvist, a seventh grader, spends her summers as a teen volunteer at Coldwater Zoo, which runs a recovery program for California condors. These huge vultures nearly disappeared in the 1980s. Zoos raised chicks and released them, and today a few hundred condors fly free. Each wild bird wears a numbered wing tag, such as C-12.

2Condors are scavengers: they feed on the bodies of large dead animals. Sometimes a carcass holds tiny fragments of lead. A condor swallows its food into the crop, a stretchy pouch in its throat. Muscle tissue in the crop wall squeezes food on to the stomach and intestine, where food is broken down and nutrients are absorbed into the blood. Anything else absorbed there, such as lead, enters the blood too. The heart pumps blood through vessels to cells all over the body.

3Each fall the team traps the wild condors for health checks. The zoo's vet, Dr. Rohan Batra, tests a drop of each bird's blood for lead, in micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL). He weighs the bird, checks whether its crop empties within 24 hours and watches how it grips a perch. He explained that lead harms nerve cells. Nerves carry signals from the brain to muscles, including the muscle tissue in the crop wall and the wings.

4Condor C-40 was the sickest bird this year. Twice a day for the first 10 days, Dr. Batra injected a medicine that attaches to lead in the blood. The kidneys filter the medicine and the lead out of the blood, and they leave the body in the urine. Until her crop worked again, the team gave C-40 a liquid diet through a soft tube. A condor is released only when its blood lead is below 30 µg/dL, its crop empties within 24 hours and it can grip a perch and fly.