This Week in Science (Carrying Capacity and Relationships)

Well this week in science we played a game, called "OH DEER". The game was to teach us about carrying capacity in a habitat. We had two groups of students, one group were the "deer" in the habitat and the other group was the "limiting factors". The resources of the group were water, food and shelter. we had the two groups face opposite directions and the "limiting factors" and "deer" groups would have to pick to either be water, food or  shelter. For food the would put both hands on their stomach, for water they would have to put their hands over their mouth and for shelter they had to make a roof over their head with their hands. Then when the teacher would say "ready, get set, Go" the two groups would turn to face each other and the deer would have to run to the resources they chose. If they didn't get their resource they would die. Then we graphed our data on the game. The carrying capacity the number of organisms any environment can support. Limiting factors are the available energy, water, oxygen and minerals, and the ability of ecosystem to recycle the remains of dead organisms ( activities of bacteria and fungi )
We learned how organisms interact in their environment. We learned the symbiotic relationships, which were, mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. In order to understand these better, we watched some videos and played a card game. In the game we had to match different situations with the type of relationship it belonged to. The mutualism relationships is when both animals benefit from the relationship, an example of this would be when a bird picks the bugs and dead skin off an animal, they're both benefitting from this.. The commensalism relationship is when one animal benefits from it but the other is unaffected from it, for example when an animal kills its prey and doesn't finish it and another animal follows it and eats the remains. Parasitism relationships is when a parasite lives off the host, an example of this would be when a tick lives off a dog, by sucking its blood.

This is a picture of when we finished playing the card game. All the situations matched with the relationship they belong in.