Animal Adaptations & Food Chains

Virginia Science SOL 3.4, 3.5

SOL 3.4 –Behavioral and physical adaptations allow animals to respond to life needs.

SOL 3.5 – Interdependent feeding relationships of plants and animals exist in aquatic and terrestrial food chains.

Note to Parents: If your child knows the material on this study guide, he or she will do well on the test for this unit. Please help your child prepare.

Key Words and Definitions:

Hibernation: Going into a deep winter sleep

Migration: Traveling long distances as the seasons change

Instinctive behaviors: Those that happen naturally and do not have to be learned

Learned behaviors: Those obtained by interacting with the environment and are taught

Camouflage: Use of color in a surrounding to blend in

Mimicry: Looking or sounding like another living organism

Producers: Are capable of making their own food

Consumers: Animals that eat living organisms

Decomposers: Organisms that break down dead plants and animals

Herbivore: An animal that eats only plants

Carnivore: An animal that eats only other animals

Omnivore: An animal that eats both plants and animals

Predator: A carnivore that kills and eats other animals

Prey: The animals that are hunted by other animals

Physical Adaptations / Behavioral Adaptations
Physical adaptations are body structures that allow an animal to find and consume food, defend itself, and reproduce its species.
  • camouflage
  • mimicry
  • chemical defenses (venom, ink, sprays)

  • special body coverings and parts (claws, beaks, feet, armor plates, skulls, teeth)

Strong beak for gathering food
Webbed feet for swimming

Quills for defense / Instinctive Behaviors
  • gathering and storing food
  • finding shelter
  • defending oneself
  • raising young
  • hibernating
  • migrating
Bears hibernate in winter
Geese migrate to warmer weather
Learned Behaviors
  • hunting
  • commands/tricks (horses, dogs)
  • reading (humans)
Lion cub learning to hunt for food

Food Chain: Living things interact and depend upon each other for the food they need.

Carnivore consumer: Depends on the mouse to survive

Omnivore consumer: Depends on the grasshopper to survive

Herbivore consumer: Depends on the plant to survive

Producer: All food chains begin with a green plant

The mushroom is a decomposer that breaks down dead plants and animals into

small pieces. The nutrients are put back into the soil so that living things can grow

and continue the food chain.

In this relationship the fox is the predator and the rabbit is the prey.

Life cycles:

Plant: seed, plant begins to grow, adult plant, plant flowers, fruit grows,

Butterfly: egg, larva, pupa, adult

Frog, tadpole, tadpole with legs, young frog with tail (froglet), adult frog