Ecosystems Lesson 7

​Answer the following questions in your blog post. Remember to have at least one follow-up sentence for each question, when possible.

1. Where do you think the items came from originally?
2. Do you think the items look the same today as they did a month ago?
3. What happened to the matter in each item over the past month?
4. Do you think the items will be the same forever? Why or why not?
5. What do all of the items in the bag have in common?
6. Do you notice any relationships between the items in the bags? They all...
7. What evidence do you have that the items were all once part of a living thing?
8. Another name for "nature's waste" is "organic remains." These are all organisms that are no longer living, or parts of organisms that are discarded, excreted, or no longer needed.  What other examples of organic remains can you think of?
9. What would happen to each item from your bag if it were left outside? What might it look like in 6 months? What would cause it to change?
10. What would eventually happen to the waste MATTER in each type of organic remain?
11. Why isn't the earth just piled up with all the matter from nature's waste?
12. Why could all of the items in the mystery bags be classified as nature's waste?
13. Do you think that all living things generate waste? What makes you think that?

Answers:

1. I think they all came from plants in an ecosystems. The leaf would come from a tree, the pine cone would com from a tree also, and the grass clippings would come from the grass in the ground.
2. I do not think so because a month ago, they were most likely attached to a plant. Like for instance, the flower would probably be closed up and not opened yet.
3. The matter got dehydrated and started to turn harder. Some of the matter got brown, others just started to break apart.
4. The items will definitely not be same forever. Over time, the matter would start to decay and become a part of the soil. Matter never disappears, it just changes form. 
5. All of them started out either as a plant, or part of a plant. For example, the pinecones were part of a pine tree at one time, and the leaf stopped doing photosynthesis, they just fell off the tree they were on and died.
6. The relationships between all of the plants are, they all are waste of different plants and they are all matter.
7. Some of the evidence that we know that they were once living is that they all have water in them and they all have evidence that they were from a plant.
8. The organic remains that I could think of are fruit, vegetables, polin and all of the other stuff that falls from a plant.
9. If you left them outside for 6 months, then the matter would start to decompose, and it would become part of the ground to provide nutrients to other plants.
10. The matter would decompose. This is very important to all living things because it would help us to create more plants and organisms. 
11. I don't know for sure why this doesn't happen but the two things I think could be possibilities are: The remains of the organisms would just break down and all of the nutrients would be used up by new organisms, and that would make a cycle.
12. Because once the plants that they were or they were on decided that they didn't need it, or it was dying, the plant just let go of the waste.
13. I think they do because the only 2 categories of life on earth is animals and plants. Animals (including humans) poop out their waste that they don't need anymore. And the plants just let their waste fall to the ground for other organisms to use.