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Habitats
What are habitats?
What do habitats provide?
Habitats in Space
Habitats in Time
What is the environment?
What is an ecosystem?
What is a niche?
How do we classify living things?
Animals vs Plants
How do we classify animals?
What animals live in urban areas?
Where can I find these animals?
What evidence do animals leave behind?
So, you want to attract animals to your
playground?
Animal Tracks
Telling Tracks Apart
So, you say you want classroom habitats?
What do I need to keep animal habitats in
the classroom?
 What
are habitats?
- Places where plants, microorganisms, or animals normally live
- Habitats must be seen from the organism's point of view
- Earthworms live in the soil in the forest
v Birds live among the trees In the forest
- Usually refer to habitats by main physical/vegetation form: woodland, stream, desert habitat
- No organism lives in all habitats, each specializes
What
do habitats provide?
- Food and water:
- must be available within animal's range
- availability varies seasonally
- Shelter and/or cover
- Place to live
- Place to hide
- Meeting place, trees, shrubs
- Egg laying water bodies
- Place to raise young
- Special land food, e.g., for caterpillars
Habitats
in Space
- Continuous: favorable area is larger than the organism can cover
- Patchy: favorable and unfavorable conditions are interspersed
- Isolated: restricted favorable areas are far from others for the organism to disperse between them
Habitats
in Time
- Constant: If conditions remain favorable or unfavorable indefinitely
- Seasonal: regular alteration of favorable and unfavorable periods
- Unpredictable: favorable periods interspersed by unfavorable ones in no particular pattern
- Ephemeral short period that is favorable
What
is the environment?
- All the elements in an organism's surroundings that can influence its behavior, reproduction or survival
- Biotic components: other animals/plants
- Abiotic components: temperature, humidity, etc.
- Organisms consume or use up resources
What
is an ecosystem?
- Self-contained mass of organisms
- All organisms and their physical environment
- All the energetic interactions and material cycling that link organisms in a community with one another and their environment
- "Any unit . . . that includes all the organisms that function together (the biotic community) in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined biotic structures and cycling of materials between living and non-living parts." (Odum, 1983)
What
is a niche?
- Refers to the way an organism retains resources
- The ecological role of a species in the community
- Different species of birds catch insects in different ways
- From ground
- From air
- From vegetation
- We say that each lives in the same habitat (e.g., address) but that their niche (or occupation) is different.
How
do we classify living things?
- Kingdom: based on cellular organization, and mode of nutrition
- Monera: single-cell, autotroph, e.g., bacteria
- Protista: single-celled, eukaryote, autotroph or photsynthetic, e.g., slime mold, protozoa
- Fungi: absorption, multicellular, e.g., mushrooms
- Plantae: photosynthetic, multicellular, e.g., plants
- Animalia: heterotroph, multicellular
Animals
vs Plants
- Nutrition: animals are hetrotrophs but plants are autotrophs (photosynthetic)
- Movement: most animals move around
- Life cycle:
- Plants --> seed, seedling, plant
- Animals --> eggs to juveniles
- --> metamorphosis (complete or not)
- --> live births to juveniles
How
do we classify animals?
- Vertebrates:
- fish
- amphibians: frogs, toads (land/water stages)
- birds: specialized reptiles that fly, feathered
- mammals: hair, milk, high body temperature
- monotremes:platypus (eggs but nurses)
- marsupials: opossums (immature infants, pouches)
- Invertebrates:
- Sponges: colony of cells, aquatic
- Jellyfish: differentiated cells, aquatic
- Molluscs: soft body in hard calcium shell, slugs, clams, squids
- Annelids: segmented worms, earthworms
- Arthropods: jointed appendages, segmented, exoskeleton
- insects
- arachnids
- crustaceans
- Echinoderms: radically symmetrical: urchins, star fish
What
animals live in urban areas?
- Insects and Invertebrates
- spiders: web and orb weavers, daddy-longlegs
- centipedes: soil, leaf litter, under logs: carnivores
- silverfish: eat starchy materials, books
- dragonflies: have aquatic larval stage
- crickets
- cockroaches: nocturnal
- termites
- butterflies
- gypsy moth and tent caterpillar moth
- house fly and mosquito
- yellow jackets and bees
- Birds:
- house sparrows (imported from England!)
- house finches (native of Western US)
- European starlings (from Europe)
- common crow
- bluejay
- pigeon
- Mammals:
- house mouse
- rats
- eastern gray squirrel
- chipmunks
- raccoon
- rabbit
- skunk
- bat
- cat
- dogs
Where
can I find these animals?
- Walls
- crevices: check especially in winter
- moss: spiders, ants, mites, snails, etc.
- Pavements, stony paths
- under stones: springtails, ants, earthworms, beetles, etc.
- cracks, in between stones: ants, earthworms, centipedes, etc.
- Mowed lawns
- Flower beds
- bees, butterflies, moths (depends on Insecticide use)
- Trees:
- hollow trunks: raccoons, squirrels
- nests: birds and squirrels
- leaves and trunks: lots of insects, spiders
- fallen logs: lots of critters
- Shrubs
- small mammal nests, some bird nests
- Ponds
- Abandoned Lots
- Railway lines
What
evidence do animals leave behind?
- Insects
- leaf damage, chewed nuts, galls, webs
- Birds
- Small mammals
- gnawed vegetation, nests, scat
So,
you want to attract animals to your playground?
- You will need to provide:
- Food
- Cover
- Water
- Place to raise young
- Birds
- Food: bird feeders with a variety of seeds:
- sunflower, niger, safflower, millet seed, cracked corn, and suet
- make sure squirrels, mice cannot get at feeders!
- hang from trees if at all possible
- Water: elevated bird baths ( winter freezing?)
- Cover: probably not an issue
- Place to raise young:
- Nesting material: simple nesting boxes
- Butterflies
- Food:
- flower bed with a combination of annuals and perennials including:butterfly weed, butterfly bush, lantana, purple cone flower, garden phlox, zinnias
- Caterpillars may need special foods
- Cover: flower bed
- Water: elevated bird bath
Animal
Tracks:
- Animal tracks can be found in
- Animals differ in the type of track they make
- number of toes
- track pattern
- track size
Telling
Tracks Apart
- Toe number:
- deer: 2
- rabbits, hare, cats, fox, dog: 4
- weasel, skunk, raccoon, oppossum: 5
- mice, squirrel, chipmunk: 5 hind, 4 front
- Rabbits & Squirrels
- place hind feet in front of forefeet
- rabbits place one forefoot behind the other
- squirrels place forefeet next to each other
So,
you say you want classroom habitats?
- Be certain:
- animals can thrive in captivity
- you can duplicate their natural habitat
- they can adjust to classroom environment
- you can care for them on weekends
- Avoid: wild, venomous, sick, threatened, or injured animals
What
do I need to keep animal habitats in the classroom?
- Container ( animal-specific)
- Cage should:
- provide for animal's well-being
- good visibility and easy access
- prevent animal escapes
- replicate natural habitat as much as possible
- Source of light
- Source of Heat
- Nesting media
- Food and water…
- KEEP IT CLEAN!!!!!!
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