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Hello Ranger Cortez. Hi Kaylee. Dr. D said you might be coming over for a visit today.

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What can I help you out with? I'm concerned about the fish in the bay. No one has caught

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any for a long time. I'm trying to figure out what's happened to them. Well what do

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you think happened to them? I think it might be because they don't have enough food to

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eat. That's possible. Have you checked to see if anything happened to disrupt the food

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web? What's a food web? Organisms that live together in an area are called a community.

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Members of the community depend on each other for survival. This dependence is called the

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food web. How do they depend on each other? In a typical community you'll find producers,

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consumers, and decomposers. Plants and algae are producers. They take the energy from life

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and use that to convert carbon dioxide, water, and minerals into food. This process is called

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photosynthesis. What are consumers? Organisms that eat other organisms are called consumers.

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There are three different kinds of consumers. Do you know what they are? I think that one is

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a herbivore. They eat plants. And one is a carnivore. They eat other animals. That's right.

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And an omnivore is a consumer that eats both plants and animals. I guess that makes me an

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omnivore. You can see how they all depend on each other. If plants didn't exist, the herbivores

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would have nothing to eat and they would not survive. And if the herbivores didn't survive,

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then the carnivores wouldn't have anything to eat. That's right. You catch on quick.

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What are decomposers? In order for a community to be successful, there must be a way to return

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the minerals and other basic ingredients back to the producers. Decomposers do this. How do

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they do that? Decomposers, bacteria and fungi, feed on dead producers and consumers and convert

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them back to the basic materials needed by producers to grow and reproduce. It's a cycle.

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That's correct. Now what you might want to do is take a look at the ocean and see if there's

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anything that happened to disrupt the cycle of the food web. That's a great idea. Thanks. Oh,

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by the way, would you mind taking a couple of plants to Dr. D for me? The first terrarium.

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Sure, no problem. Great.