African Safari Project

Read the African Safari storyDraw the food web that is described: you must

include the names of the organisms and ALL appropriate arrows (pictures of the organisms can be included for bonus)

Create the tables and answer the questions that follow.

African SafariWe arrived in Nairobi in December and it was blistering hot. We gathered our crew together,

gassed up the Land Rovers and began our search for the source of the Nile. We had only enough money

for a week expedition and we had to cross the tropical savanna, which seemed to stretch endlessly before us. Beyond the savanna was the jungle and

finally the Nile River.

The savanna was like an ocean of grass that stretched forever and only by watching closely we could see the white-tailed deer grazing on a kind of grass our native guide called the ‘short grass.’ This grass seemed to be the major type around during the first day we were out and Jim noticed an Impala also grazing on this short variety of grass.

As we approached the campsite for the night we heard a terrible commotion and could see that some sort of a mad scramble was taking place in the concealed stretches of ‘tall grass’ that we had been driving through the last few hours. We decided to let well enough alone temporarily and check it out in the morning. When we returned to the area the next day, we found the remains of a wildebeest that had at one time been peacefully feeding on the ‘tall grass.’ As we approached, a cloud of vultures begrudgingly went into the air.

On close inspection of the battlefield, we found lion (he must of eaten the wildebeest) tracks everywhere. I was a bit frightened, to say the least, when I heard a rustling in the ‘tall grass’ behind me. However, our guide said that he had seen a hyena run from the wildebeest remains as we approached.

A few meters further into the grass one of the natives found a freshly killed hyena. It appeared as if the hyena pack had become a bit carried away in the process of feasting on the wildebeest remains and the fight had ensued. Our guide said that the vultures had already found the hyena as well as the wildebeest remains.

Being rather curious, we slit open the dead hyena and found the partial remains of some sort of rodent. Our helpful native guide told us that hyenas only eat animals that are already dead; they don’t eat animals they themselves kill. We thought we would carry the process one step further and found only partially digested ‘tall grass’ in the stomach of the rodent. We were lucky that our unfortunate hyena had managed to get the entire rodent all to himself.

During the second day, we began approaching an area where there were a few Acacia trees and some giraffes feasting on the trees. It was nice to begin seeing a slightly different landscape. Unfortunately, we came across an injured lion that started after us and we had to shoot him. Having found the results of our previous days investigation into the interior of a hyena and rodent interesting, we decided to see what action this lion had been up to. He had been rather active for we found remains of an impala and a giraffe in the stomach of the lion.

The rest of the day we noticed that giraffes were becoming numerous and observed them struggling to reach the most gender leaves of the Acacia trees. At camp that night, one of the crew was bitten by the Anopheles mosquito and came down with malaria, which the mosquito peacefully carries around in their salivary glands. Once more our “know-it-all” guide informed us that the mosquito also sucks the blood of wildebeests, which also suffer from malaria.

The third day we noticed some rather crumbled looking Acacia trees and on closer inspection found them crawling with termites. Our specialist in ‘small things’ had brought along a microscope and discovered numerous small flagellates in the order Protomastigida. This time I explained to our guide that the termites chew up dead wood and take it to their intestines, but they are incapable of digesting the cellulose that makes up the wood. Those tiny flagellates, which can digest the cellulose, do so in the gut of the termite, and the termite benefits because it will use the digested cellulose for food also.

After a short lunch break we came across a herd of elephants feeding on the increasingly more abundant Acacia trees. Once more our helpful guide told us that there is a type of louse that lives in the ears of the elephants and seems to cause a great deal of worry to the elephants because the louse sucks the elephants body fluids. Maybe that is one of the reasons that elephants are always flapping their ears!

We had entered the jungle area by now and the elephants were there too. I could hardly believe it when I saw a gray monkey riding along perched on the elephant’s head joyfully helping himself to a meal of lice. I guess we scared him because he suddenly jumped from the elephant’s head into a berry bush and had just reached for a handful of berries to eat when he was attacked by a boa constrictor that had been waiting for a meal on a branch above the berry bush.

The snake slowly squeezed the life from the monkey and proceeded to swallow him whole. In another berry bush nearby a long-tailed monkey was peacefully munching on his berry lunch when a cheetah pounced up into the bush and away with the unsuspecting creature. Gosh, this is a wild place.

Well, after moving into quieter territory, we settled down among the lichen covered rocks to enjoy our lunch, keeping a sharp eye open for more action. Naturally, our guide had to tell us that the lichen we sat on was a strange sort of organism(s). It seems that it’s not really just one organism, but two. One fungus, which typically can’t make its own food, and the other is an algae that the fungus slowly consumes. The algae obtains moisture and minerals from the fungus, but makes its own food through photosynthesis as green plants do. The whole mass (the algae and fungus) living together is a lichen. (you do not need to include lichen on your food web)

The next day we finally reached the Nile and found our elephant again. They were busy cooling off and eating some of the water plants around. There were some hippos just a bit further down stream enjoying a water plant diet too.

One of the crew caught a fish for lunch and found that it had a belly full of water plants and a leech was attached to its side as well. The fish was almost dead because the leech had sucked most of the fish’s body fluids for its own meal. On the opposite bank of the Nile a crocodile plunged into the river after a fish, while another one was feasting on a shore bird.

There were a lot of shore birds around and they were churning up and eating the light green floating algae that grew close to shore. Great masses of the algae floated downstream because of the rooting around the birds. The hippos were overjoyed because of this, since algae are their favorite food and there was plenty of it floating around today.

After all this, who cares about the source of the Nile. There is too much else going on in the natural world to think about where the Nile really starts.

Questions

1. Create a table that organizes the following organisms into the following categories: autotroph, herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, scavenger

Impala gray monkeyWildebeest boa constrictorVultures hippopotamusHyena algaeTall grass crocodileLion elephantCheetah berry bushLong-tailed monkey acacia tree

2. Create a second table the organizes the same organisms into the following categories: producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, quaternary consumers, and scavengers (make sure to include every trophic level for each organism)

Impala gray monkeyWildebeest boa constrictorVultures hippopotamusHyena algaeTall grass crocodileLion elephantCheetah berry bushLong-tailed monkey acacia tree

3. a. Would all of the organisms from your tables make up an ecosystem or a community?

Explain your answer.

4. Draw and Energy Pyramid that includes the following food chain:

acacia tree, elephant, lice, gray monkey, boa constrictor

a. Which organism gets the most energy from the acacia tree?

b. On your energy pyramid, show 70,000kCal of energy in the acacia tree. Label the amount of energy that the elephant, lice, monkey, and boa constrictor will get from this food chain

c. If the giraffe also ate off of the acacia tree, how much energy would it get from the tree?

5. Draw a numbers pyramid that contains the following food chain: tall grass, wildebeest, lion

a. Which organism would you expect to find more of in the tropical savannah: the lion or the wildebeest?

6. The organisms involved in returning the nutrients to the soil are missing from this food web. What do we call these organisms?

Chapter 4 Questions

7. Name two organisms from the African Safari that would more than likely exhibit interspecific competition with one another.

What would they be competing over?

8. Identify one example of mutualism. Explain how BOTH organisms benefit from this relationship.

9. Identify one example of parasitism. Explain how each organism is affected by the parasitic relationship.

10. Identify another example of parasitism. Explain how each organism is affected by the parasitic relationship.

11. List three different predator/prey relationships that are found in the African Safari. Identify which organism is the predator and which organism is the prey (do not include producers as prey)

12. a. Name the biome where the African Safari takes place.

b. describe 3 abiotic factors that characterize this biome.

c. describe 3 biotic factors that characterize this biome.