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A Rainforest in a Box: Matter and Energy in a Zoo's Frog Tanks

Grade 7 life science: use a zoo's bioactive frog tanks, a decomposer test and a sealed jar model to show matter cycling and energy flowing in an ecosystem.

Grade 7ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-LS2-3

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What’s included

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

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 7
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students analyze a decomposer test to explain how matter returns to producers in an ecosystem.
Students use a sealed jar model to tell matter cycling apart from energy flow.
Students trace what producers, consumers and decomposers take in and give back.

How to use

Read paragraph 2 together and sketch the tank's model as arrows on the board before students start. Section 2 works well as a discussion of what a sealed jar can and cannot show.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-LS2-3

Model how matter cycles and energy flows among producers, consumers and decomposers in an ecosystem.

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A Rainforest in a Box: Matter and Energy in a Zoo's Frog Tanks

Use a clean-up crew test and a sealed jar model to show how matter cycles and energy flows.

The clean-up crew test

Read the passage and study Table 1. Then answer the questions.

Rainforest in a Box

1The Amphibian Conservation Center at Cedar Hill Zoo raises an endangered kind of tree frog so that young frogs can be released into protected forest. Many of the frogs live in bioactive tanks: small glass rainforests with soil, leaf litter, live ferns and moss under a lamp that is on 12 hours a day. Thirteen-year-old Omar Farouk spent his summer as a teen intern with the center's lead keeper, Dr. Abigail Rosenthal.

2Dr. Rosenthal explained how a bioactive tank works. The ferns and moss use light energy to make sugar from carbon dioxide and water, and they take up minerals such as nitrogen from the soil. The frogs eat crickets that the zoo raises on fresh greens. Dead leaves and frog droppings fall onto the soil. Tiny animals called isopods and springtails, the tank's “clean-up crew,” eat dead leaves and droppings, and springtails also graze on mold. Fungi and bacteria in the soil break the leftover bits down further, giving off carbon dioxide and returning minerals to the soil.

3To show what the clean-up crew does, Omar set up four tanks without frogs. All four had the same soil, the same 3 young ferns and the same lamp and misting schedule. On each soil surface he spread 20 g of dried leaves and 5 g of dried frog droppings. Two tanks also got 30 isopods and about 200 springtails; the other two got none. After 8 weeks, he collected and dried what was left of the leaves and droppings, counted the new fern fronds (leaves) and counted the patches of fuzzy white mold on the surface.

4Omar also built a sealed model ecosystem: a 2 L glass jar with damp soil, moss, one small fern and a few dozen springtails. He sealed the lid, weighed the whole jar and set it under a lamp that was on 12 hours a day. He weighed the jar each month and checked on its living things. A thermometer inside showed that the jar stayed about 2 °C warmer than the room while the lamp was on. After 4 months, the moss and fern were green and growing slowly, and the springtails were still active, although he never opened the jar to feed them.