Rabbits

Based on this rabbit lesson, use the vocabulary words (litter, newborn, kit, young, adult) to draw and label the rabbit life cycle.

Using the texts Rabbits vs. Hares and All About Rabbits, and this video clip, compare and contrast rabbits and hares. Complete the Venn diagram showing the similarities and differences between rabbits and hares.

Choose a topic (Rabbit Defenses, Rabbit Communication, or Rabbit Life Cycle) and write a one-page paper describing what you have learned about rabbits.

Measure the length of a standard long jump done by several second-grade classmates. Compare to the length that a rabbit can jump.

Solve word problems such as the following: If there are 29 species of wild rabbits and 30 species of hares, how many total wild species are there? If there are 108 kinds of wild and domestic rabbits in all, how many of those are domestic breeds? If there are 49 breeds of recognized domestic rabbits and 12 of them are lop-eared rabbits, how many breeds are erect-eared rabbits?

Solve the following problem: If a female rabbit has 10 kits per litter and has 4 litters per year, how many kits will she have in a year? If she has five daughters in each litter who then have 8 kits each, how many grandchildren does she have? If half of the grandchildren are female and each of those has 7 kits, how many descendants does the original rabbit have?

All animals need food in order to live and grow. All living things need water.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land. They live in places that have the things they need.

Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see; hear; grasp objects; protect themselves; move from place to place; and seek, find, and take in food, water, and air. Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive.

Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive.

Young animals are very much, but not exactly, like their parents. Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. Examples of patterns could include features plants or animals share. Observations could include that a particular breed of animal looks like its parents, but is not exactly the same.

Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles. Changes organisms go through during their life form a pattern.

The environment affects the traits that an animal develops. Some characteristics result from individuals' interactions with the environment.

Examples of evidence could include needs and characteristics of the organisms and habitats involved. The organisms and their habitat make up a system in which the parts depend on each other.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.

Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal’s brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions. Emphasis is on systems of information transfer.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. Examples of cause and effect relationships could be that animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

When the environment changes in ways that affect a place’s physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of resources, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die. Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life. Newly introduced species can damage the balance of an ecosystem.

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources.

Examples of types of interactions could include competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial. Predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments, both living and nonliving, are shared.

Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem.

Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations.