SEAS curriculum: Unit 4
Surveying deep-sea organisms and investigating how they survive
This unit contains four activities. Each can be downloaded separately.
Introduction
This unit introduces students to:
- Food webs and energy production (chemosynthesis) in hydrothermal vent ecosystems
- Population distributions and community succession
- Photomosaic techniques to study remote populations
Activity 1: Please pass the engery
after constructing a food web for a typical ocean community of plants and animals fueled by energy from the sun, students are introduced to the organisms that can be found at hydrothermal vents. They are challenged to build a food web for them. Faced with a web lacking plants and sunlight, they develop hypotheses about how these deep-sea animals survive
Download Unit 4 Activity 1 now (1MB .pdf)
Activity 2: How do you get your energy?
Students compare photosynthesis and chemosynthesis, looking at the sources of energy and energy transfer in these two systems. They learn about the symbiotic relationship bacteria have with tubeworms and discuss other symbiotic relationships that bacteria form with familiar animals: termites, cows and people. To emphasize how ubiquitous bacteria are, students explore sources of bacteria in their own classroom and conduct an experiment to determine where they think the most bacteria may be found.
Download Unit 4 Activity 2 now (1MB .pdf)
Activity 3: Using photo images to explore life on the ocean floor
Students are introduced to several principles of experimental design as they use transects to randomly sample mussels and learn to look at correlations between temperature and the presence of organisms on a photomosaic from a hydrothermal vent field. They analyze their data, discuss the influence of variability in data on conclusions and give suggestions for trying to limit the variability.
Download Unit 4 Activity 3 now (3.1MB .pdf)
Download images for Unit 4 Activity 3 now (11.3MB .pdf)
Activity 4: Change over time
Students learn about colonization and succession in a hydrothermal vent community. They enact a dive in which they observe a "Snowblower" event. They make observations, inferences, and predictions on a series of images at the same location over the next several years.
Download Unit 4 Activity 4 now (1.5MB .pdf)