Marine Food Webs & Energy
📋 What it is
Ocean energy flows from sunlight → plankton → small fish → big predators in a connected web.
🗣️ Coach says
Ocean life is linked by who-eats-whom. Energy starts with sunlight captured by tiny PLANKTON, which are eaten by small fish, which feed bigger fish, then top predators like sharks. It’s a WEB, not a simple chain — remove one link and the whole web feels it. Everything traces back to the Sun.
🧠 Memory hook
Ocean food web: sunlight → plankton → small fish → big fish → predators. Remove a link → whole web wobbles.
😂 Giggle
What do sea turtles use to communicate?
Shell phones!
😲 Whoa!
It takes about a thousand kilograms of tiny plankton to eventually produce one kilogram of top-predator fish like tuna — energy is lost at every step up the web.
✅ Quick check: What’s at the base of nearly every ocean food web?
Say your answer out loud first — then reveal.
Tiny plankton that capture sunlight’s energy — the foundation everything else feeds upon.
Plankton are the ocean’s primary producers.
🧪 Try it! (2 minutes)
Draw arrows: sun → plankton → small fish → big fish → shark. That chain is part of a bigger web.