A pond is a community of plants and animals that depend on each other.
Animals depend on plants for food, air, and shelter. Plants depend on animals for seed dispersal, pollination, and nutrients.
Plants and animals are both important parts of a web of life.
Pond communities change with the seasons.
Background Information
A pond is a shallow body of standing fresh water with a thick mud bottom, where plants with roots grow inward from the shore.
Ecology is the study of the interactions between living organisms and their environment.
An ecosystem is a community within a specific area where interactions among organisms and the environment take place. An ecosystem can be as small as a puddle or as large as an ocean.
Pond species are dependent upon each other. Muskrats eat cattails and use other wetland plants to build their homes. Muskrat tunnels make small pockets of water that shelter animals like frogs, turtles, snails, dragonflies, and butterflies; these animals are food for birds .
A food chain is a series of interactions between species where one type of organism consumes another. All interactions are fueled by the sun, which supplies the energy for life. Producers such as plants use energy from the sun to make food in a process called photosynthesis. A cattail is an example of a producer. Consumers, who are unable to make their own food, eat producers. Primary consumers eat plants and are called herbivores. A duck is an example of a primary consumer. Secondary consumers eat primary consumers, and are called carnivores. A frog is an example of a secondary consumer. The final link is the decomposers that break down dead material, returning nutrients to the soil, which is in turn recycled by the producers.
A web of life is a series of interconnected food chains and other relationships that show the many different beneficial interactions among producers, consumers, and decomposers.
Pre-Visit Activities
Discuss what children might expect to see and/or hear at a pond.
Discuss a food chain and web of life. Have students draw plants and animals they expect to see. Create a web of life by using string to connect organisms that depend upon one another in some way. Discuss the implications of removing even a single species from this web.
Discuss the role of the animals and plants, and how they help each other.
Inquiry Activities at the Garden
Draw and write observations of plants and animals interacting with one another.
Record in your journal plants and animals living in the pond.
Observe what pond animals eat or make predictions about their diet based on behavior (ducks tip their heads under water to eat vegetation) or the shape of their mouths (frogs have wide mouths to catch insects).
Visit the pond in different seasons and note how it changes.
Look for evidence of the pond as a home to animals (shelters, nests).
Listen to the sounds of the pond.
Do living things really fit neatly into one part of a web of life? Not always!
Some micro-organisms (such as bacteria), can make food and eat food. How do they affect the number of connections in your web of life?
Can you describe how humans play several different roles in a web of life?
Do any other species break the rules?
Post-Visit Activities
Create a mural depicting the pond.
Create murals for other seasons to show change.
Select a pond species and research how it survives seasonal changes.
Create a classroom web of life. Draw animals and plants seen at the pond. Link them with yarn. Discuss the role of the sun in the web.
Role-play each link in the web of life.
Categorize species by what they eat (consumer, producer, decomposer) or taxonomically (bird, insect, amphibian, plant).
Make noises of the plants and animals heard. Assign one sound to each group of students and create a pond symphony.
Collect some pond or puddle water. Make a water scope using a card board tube or a cup with no bottom. Cover the top with plastic wrap secured with a rubber band. Place bottom in the water to observe organisms closely by viewing through top.