Predator and Prey Relationships! Loving Science!

Last week was a busy week in science for 3B!  We had a lot of "special guest" show up all at once so it was seriously crunch time before the "special guest" died.  Hopefully your 3B child has shared some information about a few of them.

Some of our guests were aphids.  We had a super time analyzing them and counting their population that is slowly starting to take over the beans that we planted the first week of school.  Everyone was excited to learn about their "exoskeletons"!  We have not counted the population in a few days, but I think the students will be surprised tomorrow when they recount the aphids and look at the bean plants.  Yikes!

Another set of guests are known as daphnia.  They are tiny creatures that live in water.  The cool thing about them is that you can see their digestive track and chamber of eggs if you look close enough as they appear "see through".  We observed them for a few days before introducing them to.....

their enemy of the damselfly nymphs.  The students really enjoyed slowly dropping the daphnia to their death by putting them in with the damselfly nymphs.  You could have heard a pin drop in the room as the students waited quietly hoping to see one of the damselflies go in for the attack.

All of these special guest are showing the students the relationship between predator and prey and how populations change.  We have two more types of "guest" to observe and watch this week.

Now you know why students LOVE science.