WorksheetPremium

Back to the Island: Interactions in a Zoo Release Program

Grade 7 life science: analyze a zoo's island bird release data, a fig seed test and fig-tree watches to explain predation, mutualism and competition.

Grade 7ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-LS2-2

Buy this worksheet: $1.50

Or unlock every Premium worksheet with Premium

PrintUnlock to print

Answer keyUnlock to see answers

Assign to classUnlock to assign with a class code

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, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use release data to explain how an introduced predator affects a prey population.
Students use seed and feeding data to identify mutualism and competition and their effects.
Students predict how changing one interaction affects other organisms in the ecosystem.

How to use

Assign one table to each small group to report on first, then have everyone finish the matching and the written argument.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-LS2-2

Explain patterns of interactions among organisms in ecosystems: competition, predation and mutually beneficial relationships.

Preview

OwlSheets.com

Name Date

Back to the Island: Interactions in a Zoo Release Program

Use release, seed and feeding data to explain predation, mutualism and competition.

Releasing the rails

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

A Bird Without Its Forest

1The rail in this story is a brown, nearly flightless bird about the size of a small chicken. It eats snails, insects and seeds on the forest floor. Decades ago, brown tree snakes arrived by accident on the rail's home island, which this worksheet calls Tamaru Island. The snakes climb trees and hunt at night, and they eat birds, eggs, lizards and small mammals. Within about 30 years, most of the island's forest birds had disappeared, and the last wild rails were taken into zoos.

2The Westbrook Zoo now breeds rails and helps return them to the wild. Seventh grader Teodor Balan visited the zoo's conservation office, where biologist Dr. Lusiana Tuilagi showed him data from three release sites. Site A is a small island nearby that brown tree snakes never reached. Site B is a patch of forest on Tamaru Island where crews set snake traps every week. Site C is a forest on Tamaru Island with no traps. Each site received 40 zoo-raised rails, and crews counted the snakes caught in one test trap at each site over 100 nights (Table 1).

3Site A is also home to a pigeon called the fruit dove. Fruit doves feed mostly on the small fruits of native fig trees and swallow them whole. Hours later, they drop the seeds, often far from the tree where they fed. To test what this does for the figs, Dr. Tuilagi's team planted seeds collected from dove droppings and seeds taken straight from ripe figs, in the same soil and shade (Table 2 in Section 2). On Tamaru Island, where the snakes ate most fruit-eating birds, the team also counted young fig trees growing more than 10 m from any adult fig.

4About 15 years ago, another bird, the myna, was brought to Site A by people, and it eats figs too. Teodor's last data set came from 1-hour watches at fig trees full of ripe fruit. The team watched 20 trees where mynas were feeding and 20 trees where none were, and counted the fruit doves' visits and the figs they ate (Table 3 in Section 3).