Hey Lori how’s it going hey Chris can you
introduce us to your helpers here
absolutely have a couple students from
Haviland Middle School and Hyde Park got
Claire here and Francis fantastic so I
think you guys are going to talk to us about
food webs absolutely sounds great what
we're all part of a food web everything
that's alive on the planet is part of a
food web humans included humans eat
things like plants you know things from
plants french fries potatoes carrot
things like that as well as animal
animal products hamburgers chicken and
stuff like that we are mostly part of
the top of the food chain nothing really
eats us anymore
thankfully unless you count mosquito
bites but a lot of animals most animals
both eat other things and are eaten by
things now we're going to use Claire and
Francis here to help us model a simple
part of the food web of the Hudson River
estuary a pretty simple food chain
ok so we've got our first tank right
over here and it well it doesn't it
looks like a lot of muck in there
well it may look like just a lot of
muck but this is some of that good rich
Hudson River water that you are talking
about and it may look just like mucky
water but we have in here is some
detritus bunch of decaying bits of
plants leaves and twigs and bark and
grass and things like that we've also
got in here
I know you can't see in the water
without a microscope but we've got a lot
of microscopic bacteria we've got a lot
of slightly larger but still tiny things
like phytoplankton diatoms and algae
little tiny things that photosynthesize
just like land plants but are very very
small and then we have not a rock but we
have some zooplankton yeah
wow what are those little guys those
are mostly amphipods okay mostly
amphipods now that I'm that's that's a
type of crustacean right like a shrimp
or crab right as opposed to an insect
right right absolutely absolutely
and these little guys scurry around in
the water and they eat things like the
detritus that we were just talking about
how those feel in your hand
they are very tickly they look
cute yeah they're actually very
cool what are these guys what are these guys
that's a great question
we're gonna take a look at that right here
thanks a lot of Francis and in this tank
we have mostly spot tail shiners there's
a lot of these but there's there's a lot
fewer of the spot tail Shriners and
these kind of small fish in the river
then there are things like zooplankton
and that's because they're it takes a
whole lot of the zooplankton to feed
each of these each of these small fish
and then we have yes
oh look at that beautiful look at this
big guy
this is Albert he's a pumpkin seeds
sunfish and he certainly not the biggest
fish in the river by any means but what
do you think Albert might eat the
little fish there yeah actually he
probably would eat fish like that as
well as a bunch of larval insects and
worms and we're actually going to see if
Albert’s hungry
okay we're gonna going to see if he
wants to eat oh no oh my goodness
geez yes
holy cow oh did you see that he ate a
glass eel and the glass eel slipped
out of his gill it actually escaped
way to go survival eels I love that
that is fantastic
oh my gosh Lori this has been great well Albert is hungry
but it looks like those eels are just
way too slippery for him today
oh my goodness gracious that was cool
Lori thanks a lot for that
Hudson River food chain that was beautiful