Teacher track · about 50 minutes · 10 steps

Who eats whom, and who cleans up

Students name the producers, consumers and decomposers of a real heath, build food chains from a web of life, and learn what a food-web picture is claiming and what it is not.

One session, projector-led: the teacher drives the Cooloola web of life at the front of the room, the class talks, and the drawing happens on paper. The web holds the plants, animals and fungi you can expect to find in this heath and the ways they lean on one another, and every relationship in it carries a word saying how sure we are. That word is what makes this a better Year 4 lesson than a poster, because it separates two things children are rarely asked to keep apart: knowing how a place works, and having counted it.

Two honest beats carry the session. The first is the word on nearly every card in this web: expected. It means we know honeyeaters drink at banksia flowers, because that is what these birds and these shrubs do wherever they meet, and nobody has stood on this dune with a notebook and written that meal down. Said in kid terms, that is what a food-web diagram actually is: a picture of how a place works, not a list of what has been seen there. The second beat comes when the class asks who eats the honeyeater. The web draws a butcherbird hunting the tawny grassbird, so birds are plainly hunted here, and it draws no arrow at all onto the honeyeater. Nobody’s picture holds every meal, and spotting the gap is better science than filling it in.

For the teacher

Curriculum

The single target is AC9S4U01: the roles and interactions of producers, consumers and decomposers within a habitat, and how food chains represent feeding relationships. Note that the v9 curriculum puts decomposers in at Year 4, and this web names its cleanup crew, so the role gets taught with a cast rather than in the abstract. AC9S4I01 (pose questions, make predictions: the cleanup-crew prediction at step 7), I04 (construct representations: the drawn chains), I05 (compare findings: the sheet swap) and I06 (communicate using scientific vocabulary) all get genuine work. The achievement-standard sentence this serves: they identify the roles of organisms in a habitat and construct food chains. Every code was verified against the published curriculum before tagging, and re-checked against this version of the session.

Running it

Whole class, one screen, about 50 minutes; the steps that open the web are plain links, so you can also drop them into your class notes in order. Students need the printed sheet and a pencil each. The two mid-walk checks project well as hands-up votes; the end-check can run the same way or be skipped for time. Nothing students do on screen is recorded off the device, there are no accounts and no reports; the sheets you collect are the evidence of the session. Each sheet comes back with the producers circled, two drawn chains with the arrows at the eater, and two written answers, one of which is about an arrow the web does not draw.

Answers, if you are teaching outside your subject

The producers on the sheet are the plants: wallum banksia, scribbly gum, grass-tree, paperbark and the wallum sedges. The ground parrot, the acid frogs and the wallum fish are consumers, and the litter fungi are the decomposer hiding in the list, which is the trap worth walking into. The chain the class follows together is sunlight to banksia to the nectar queue, two links; the drawers name the queue one courier at a time, the spinebill, the little wattlebird and the white-cheeked honeyeater by day and the feathertail glider by night, and label each connection expected. Who eats the honeyeater here: the web draws nothing onto it, though it does draw the grey butcherbird hunting the tawny grassbird, so the answer you are hoping for is some version of “something probably does, and this picture does not show it”. Who does the cleanup: the panel names them now, litter fungi and wood-rot fungi through the fallen leaves and dead wood, then termites, millipedes, springtails and mites, ants moving seed and sand, and microbes down in the peat, so a prediction like “worms, beetles, fungi” lands close. If a student wants the long chain, it is sedges to grasshopper to brown quail to red-bellied black snake to kookaburra. One thing to watch on question 4: the crew’s arrows on this web come off the plants, litter fungi from the banksia’s fallen leaves, wood-rot fungi from dead scribbly gum, peat microbes from the sedges, and not off the top of a chain, because a decomposer eats what has died rather than what a hunter left. Every check card on the printed page carries its answer underneath.

The arrow rule, in kid terms

The arrow points at the eater. It is the same rule every relationship card follows, so the drawings on paper and the cards on screen never disagree.

What they will get wrong, predictably

Arrows drawn backwards, from eater to food, because “the arrow shows what it eats”; the fix is one sentence, the arrow points the way the food travels, at the eater, and the sheet swap in step 9 exists to catch the stragglers. Producers named as “anything an animal eats”, which sweeps nectar and even the frogs in; hold the line at “makes its own food from sunlight”. Links grown from imagination, an eagle or a dingo added because a chain feels like it should keep going; send them back to the web, and be ready for the good version of that argument, because a child who says “but something must eat the honeyeater” is right. The reply is that the drawing is not finished, not that the child is wrong about the heath. And the cleanup crew treated as the end of the line, the place where a chain simply stops; the ants on this very web hunt the termites, so the crew is food as well as workforce.

If you have only 40 minutes

Run steps 1 to 6 with sheet questions 1 to 3. The cleanup-crew beat and the last check, steps 7 to 10, stand alone as a 15-minute follow-up, and the end-check works as a next-day warm-up, projected as hands-up votes.

How long the chains run, and what they claim

Chains from the banksia are short, two links, because nothing on this web is drawn hunting the nectar feeders. Chains from the ground layer run much further: sedges to grasshopper to brown quail to red-bellied black snake to kookaburra is four arrows, all of them on the page. Both are worth drawing, and the difference between them is the lesson at step 6. Every arrow in either chain carries the same label, expected, which is the web saying one careful thing about all of them: this is how these plants and animals are known to live, and nobody has counted this particular meal on this particular dune.

On First Nations knowledge

The Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) people are the Traditional Owners and continuing custodians of this country. This resource presents the published scientific record only; knowledge of Country would enter it through collaboration and cultural protocol, which has not yet happened, so the activity claims no cultural curriculum content. The absence is deliberate, and it is stated in the product as well as here.

Who eats whom, and who cleans up

Name: ______________________ Class: ____________

Circle the producers, the residents that make their own food from sunlight: wallum banksia · scribbly gum · grass-tree · ground parrot · acid frogs · paperbark · wallum sedges · litter fungi · wallum fish
The meal we followed together. Draw the chain, arrows pointing at the eater. Label the producer and the consumer.
Who eats the honeyeater here? What did the web draw, and what does that tell you?
Your own chain, three or four links from the web. Label the producer and the consumers. Then add one arrow to the cleanup crew, from whatever in your chain will one day be dead leaves. Swap with a neighbour and check the arrows.
The cleanup crew. Who did you think eats the dead leaves here, and who did the web name?

Remember: the arrow points at the eater. And a food web is a picture of how a place works, not a list of what anyone has seen.

Teacher quick-start

Walk it yourself first, then project it or paste step links into your class notes: every step below is a plain URL.
Each check is formative retrieval, not summative marking; written work lands on the printed sheet, which is what you collect.
Nothing a student does here leaves their device, and nothing is reported back to anyone.
Printing works in plain black and white on A4, two ways. Print this page as-is for the teacher pack: these notes, the steps, and every check with its answer printed under it, with the student sheet on a page of its own to photocopy. The pack shows answers, so it is yours, not a class set. For the student sheet alone, follow this link to the sheet first, then print: with the sheet targeted, the printout is the sheet by itself.

Begin the pathway →

Together: name five living residents of this place. Then decide: who makes its own food? · opens the web of life, set to this step; its bar brings you back
Meet the producer. Everything here eats sunlight through plants like this one. Circle the producers on your sheet. · opens the web of life, set to this step; its bar brings you back
Which of these makes its own food from sunlight?

Producers make their own food from sunlight, and in this heath the plants are the producers: the banksia is the famous one, its flower-brushes pouring out nectar it made from light (Leiper et al. 2022 records it as one of the heath's great nectar sources). Everything else on the list is a consumer, getting food by eating from other living things: the honeyeater drinks the banksia's nectar, the sedgefrog catches insects, and the ground parrot eats from the heath's ground layer. One producer, three consumers, and every chain in this web starts at the plant. (Ch 9.)
Follow one meal: the banksia's nectar and the birds that drink it. Open the honeyeater's connection and read the drawer for what the bird gives back, and for the word that says how sure we are. · opens the web of life, set to this step; its bar brings you back
In a food chain drawing that says banksia → honeyeater, what does the arrow mean?

The arrow in a food chain always points the way the food travels: from the meal to the eater. Here the banksia's nectar is the meal and the honeyeater is the eater (Leiper et al. 2022 records honeyeaters feeding at the banksia's flower-brushes), so the arrow leaves the plant and lands on the bird. The commonest drawing mistake is pointing the arrow at the meal, as if it meant 'eats'; it means 'feeds', which runs the other way. Size has nothing to do with it, and neither does where anyone lives: the arrow tracks one thing only, the direction the energy moves. Get the arrow rule right once and every chain you ever draw will point the right way. (Ch 9.)
The web shows the honeyeater feeding at the banksia. Ask it 'and who eats the honeyeater here?' and the web draws no arrow at all. Why not?

Small birds have hunters in most places, and this heath is no exception: look along the same web and you will find the grey butcherbird hunting the tawny grassbird, one bird eating another, drawn in plain sight. So the missing arrow is not the web saying nothing eats honeyeaters. It is the web being a picture rather than a census. Somebody chose which connections to draw, they drew the ones this heath is built on, including the honeyeater at the banksia's nectar (Leiper et al. 2022 records that meal), and a picture always stops somewhere. That is worth knowing about every food web you will ever meet, in a textbook or on a poster: it shows the links somebody drew, not every meal eaten. When you spot a gap in one, you have found the edge of the drawing, which is a real thing to notice and much more interesting than a tidy diagram. (Ch 9.)
Predict before you look: open the cleanup crew's panel in the Cooloola web. Will it name this heath's decomposers?

The crew is there and the web names it, because a heath cannot work without one: leaves fall all year and the sand is not buried in them, so somebody is eating the dead. Litter fungi take the hard banksia and paperbark leaves, wood-rot fungi take the fallen gum, termites and millipedes and the springtails and mites work through what is left, ants carry seed and sand about, and down in the waterlogged peat a slow airless crew never quite finishes the job, which is why the swamp holds peat and runs tea-brown. On old leached ground this is close to the whole nutrient economy: what lives here is fed largely by what decay hands back (Walker & Syers 1976). Now the honest half, and it is worth saying out loud: every one of those relationships is labelled 'expected'. That is the web claiming these are the kinds of living things that do this work on ground like this, and not claiming that anyone has gone out on this dune and counted them. (Ch 4.)
Now open the cleanup crew and check your prediction against the names on the page. · opens the web of life, set to this step; its bar brings you back
On your sheet: draw one more food chain from this web, three or four links, then add one arrow to the cleanup crew, from whatever in your chain will one day be dead leaves. Label the producer, the consumers and the decomposer, then swap sheets with a neighbour and check each other's arrows.
Predict: if the wallum banksias stopped flowering, who would go hungry first?

The banksia's flower-brushes are the heath's filling station, pouring out some of the richest nectar going, with a queue that runs around the clock: honeyeaters and wattlebirds through the day, the feathertail glider through the night (Leiper et al. 2022 records the banksia as exactly this kind of heavy nectar source). Stop the flowers and the queue goes hungry first, because nectar is the meal the flowering made. The swamp fish are not in that queue: they live in the dark, sour water and their meals come from the swamp, not from flowers, so the loss reaches them late if at all. Predicting who is hit first is really asking who stands closest to the broken link, and the nectar feeders are standing at the pump. (Ch 9.)

The end-check — read both ends of it

You’ve walked the steps. Now put them together: answer these from what the pathway taught, not from the pages. Getting them here is what tells you it stuck.

Where does the energy in every Cooloola food chain start?

Every chain in this web begins with a plant catching sunlight and turning it into food: the banksia making nectar, the scribbly gum making sugar in its leaves. The sand cannot be the answer, and here that is the whole point of the place: Cooloola's sand is famously poor, and it gives plants a few minerals but no energy at all. The water carries life and shapes the heath, but it is not a meal either. And big animals are near the end of chains, not the start; nothing begins with an eater. Even the strangest trade in this web runs on sunlight: down in the soil, the scribbly gum pays its root fungi in sugar it made in the light (Schmidt et al. 2006 measured that partnership on this sand), so even the underground economy is spending captured sunshine. Sunlight in, food up the chain: that is the engine of the whole scene. (Ch 9.)

A honeyeater drinks nectar from the banksia's flowers. In food-chain words, what is the honeyeater?

The roles are about how you get your food, not where you spend your day. Producers make food from sunlight: the banksia, standing in the sun turning light into nectar (Leiper et al. 2022 records that nectar drawing the heath's feeding queue). Consumers eat from living things: the honeyeater drinking that nectar is a consumer even though it never leaves the flowers. Decomposers eat the dead, and the honeyeater's meals are very much alive. And every living thing in a chain has a role, feathers, fur, scales or roots alike. The near-miss to watch is the second option: sitting among producers all day does not make you one. You are what you eat, not where you perch. (Ch 9.)

Dead leaves fall on the heath all year, yet the sand is not buried in them. Who is eating the dead leaves?

Every habitat has a cleanup crew, the decomposers, and without one the heath would drown in its own dead leaves while all the food locked inside them stayed locked. The three roles make one loop: producers like the banksia make food from sunlight, consumers like the honeyeater eat from living things, and decomposers eat the dead and stock the soil so the producers can grow again. Nothing vanishes on its own; 'vanishing' is the crew at work, too small and too slow to watch. On sand as poor as Cooloola's the crew matters even more than usual, because almost the only goodness available is the goodness being recycled (Walker & Syers 1976 is the classic statement of why old ground lives on recycling). The Cooloola web names its crew: litter fungi and wood-rot fungi, termites, millipedes, springtails and mites, ants, and microbes in the peat. And here is the honest part this web shows that most posters never do. Beside every one of those names it prints the word 'expected', which means we know these are the kinds of living things that do this work on ground like this, and nobody has gone out on this dune and counted them. (Ch 4.)