LEARNING GOALS
Based on a long-term commitment to education, Busch Gardens strives to increase every student's knowledge and awareness of wildlife and to engender an appreciation of nature and a commitment to its conservation. Specific learning goals for biodiversity are that ...
- Students will explore the complexity of biodiversity.
- Students will examine the variety of life within the five kingdoms.
- Students will realize that people are dependent on intact habitats that sustain the various organisms we need to produce food, medicines, clothing, and other materials.
- Students will learn about certain species' roles in an ecosystem.
- Students will discover that life can be found almost everywhere on earth.
"We call upon the earth, our planet home, with its beautiful depths and soaring heights, its vitality and abundance of life, and together we ask that it: Teach us and show us the way ..." Chinook Blessing Litany, first verse.
The biosphere includes the living world and all its components. It is the ultimate frontier, filled with unsolved mysteries that arouse our curiosity and stir us to search for answers. The information contained in this resource is current and will be updated as new research and discoveries are realized.
Imagine wading downstream on a hot afternoon... |
| A tangy, camphor scent underfoot and a sweet, azalea musk hanging in the still afternoon air tease your senses as you splash along a sun-hazy stream. White sand bubbling from a spring silently ripples the water's surface. Dancing nymphs and sluggish tadpoles dart from under your toes as your foot sinks into the soft, black ooze of the bank. A myriad of sleek, shiny fish slip past your legs as a sunning leopard frog pips, then splashes to underwater security. An insect symphony of droning cicadas and humming mosquitoes compete with the drilling of a pileated woodpecker searching for grubs... |
| All this deceptive tranquility took 3,400 million years to coalesce. This whole picture, from the physical environment to the individual species that share it to the genes that make up each organism, is biodiversity. |
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| 1. | The oldest fossils reveal that the first organisms were single bacteria-like cells that fed on dissolved mineral compounds in the oceans. Over the aeons as these simple living forms progressed and diversified, some varieties developed the ability for photosynthesis. The production of oxygen as a by-product of this metabolic process caused one of the greatest changes on our planet. About two billion years ago, atmospheric oxygen began to gradually rise from 1% to 20%. This higher concentration of oxygen was probably a catalyst that allowed complex multicellular life to evolve 700 million years ago. | |
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| 1. | Scientists can only guess at the total number of today's existing species, maybe as many as 30 million. These are just a fraction of the millions that have come and gone. The 1.4 million identified living species are divided into five major categories called kingdoms. The bacteria and similar simple cells are in one kingdom while more complex protozoans and algae are in a second. These kingdoms are the oldest and most widespread. Food webs begin and end with microorganisms. Some transform inorganic materials into compounds used by higher life forms while some decompose the remains of other organisms after death. The photosynthetic marine algae produce perhaps 70% of the oxygen required by almost every other life form on Earth. Fungi belong to a third kingdom. Molds, mushrooms, and yeasts absorb recycled nutrients from the environment as the simpler species make it available. The multi-cellular plant kingdom photosynthesizes food for itself then feeds the members of the animal kingdom as well. Herbivores forage for plants then, in turn, become food for carnivores. Each organism within an ecosystem is inseparable from its companion species in the community because of the ecological processes that make life possible. | |
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