What is happening to these bananas?

1. What is happening to these bananas?

2. What Are the Roles of Producers, Consumers, and Decomposers? By: Miss. Harrison

3. Producers • Most living things on Earth get the energy to live from sunlight. • Any living thing that can make it’s own food is called a producer. • Producers can be as small as a tiny moss or as large as a huge redwood tree! • Example: Plants are producer!

4. Producers • Animals such as deer and cattle get the energy they need to live by eating plants. • When these animals eat, the energy stored in the plants moves into the animals’ bodies. • Not all animals eat plants. Lions and hawks, for example, get the energy they need by eating other animals.

5. Consumer • An animal that eats plants or other animals is called a consumer. • Consumers can’t make their own food, so they must eat other living things. • Some consumers eat the same kind of food all year. • Horses, for example, eat grass during warm weather. During winter, they eat hay, a kind of dried grass.

6. Consumer • Some consumers eat other consumers. • Example: Bobcats eat other consumers such as rabbits. Other favorite meals include rodents and birds. Bobcats also eat young deer.

7. Question Time! • How are producers and consumers alike and different?

8. Answer Time! • Answer: They are both living things that need energy to keep living. However, producers can make their own food, while consumers must get their food by eating producers or other consumers.

9. You Try!: • Give two examples of a producer and consumer.

10. Decomposer • Decomposer is a living thing that feeds on wastes and on the remains of dead plants and animals. • Decomposers break down wastes into nutrients. • Nutrients are substances that are taken in by living things to help them grow.

11. Decomposer • Decomposers come in many shapes and sizes. • Some of the biggest decomposers are earthworms and mushrooms.

12. Decomposer • Bacteria are tiny decomposers that can be seen only with a microscope. • The bacteria in soil break down tiny pieces of animal and plant matter. • By doing this, they fill the soil with the nutrients that plants need to grow.

13. Question Time! • Do you think bacteria that cause diseases are decomposers?

14. Answer Time! • No, decomposers break down dead tissue. Infectious bacteria live on or in another living thing.

15. You Try! • Name two kinds of decomposers, and describe their role in nature.

16. What if we didn’t have decomposers? • Earth would be covered with dead plants and animals. • Instead, decomposers turn waste and dead matter into useful nutrients. • They allow living things to use recycled nutrients!

17. The End!