Salmon

Read aloud the information found on the Salmon Facts page. Create questions together as a class that can be answered from the passages.

Study this diagram on the parts of fish anatomy. Take the quiz to see if you can label the parts.

Adopt an animated salmon and watch the challenges that a salmon must endure in order to live a full life. Write a descriptive paragraph telling about your salmon and what happened to it during its life. (requires Adobe Shockwave)

Make a detailed list of challenges that could shorten the life of a salmon and write it into paragraph form.

Use fish crackers to represent salmon while discussing addition and subtraction of salmon from a river or lake. Mention variables such as salmon leaving to head to the ocean, being eaten by predators, the hatching of alevin, or fisheries managers restocking a lake or river from a hatchery.

Salmon live 2-7 years, with the average being 4-5 years. With this information, calculate how many days a salmon lives.

Using a map and a ruler, calculate the distance that a salmon travels from a given hatching site to the ocean and back. Follow all available rivers and tributaries in order to make the most accurate analysis.

Using this guide this guide or other resources, calculate how many days a salmon lives.

All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals.

Different foods are needed by different animals. All living things need water.

Plants and animals can change their environment.

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

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

Examples of human influence on the land could include planting trees after a burn, protecting farm fields from erosion, or keeping plastic trash out of waterways.

All organisms have external parts. 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 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.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water.

Emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Water is found in the ocean, rivers, lakes, and ponds.

Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Changes animals go through during their life form a pattern.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size.

The environment affects the characteristics that organisms develop.

Examples of evidence could include needs and characteristics of the animals 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.

Energy and fuels that humans use are derived from natural sources, and their use affects the environment in multiple ways.

Examples of renewable energy resources could include water behind dams. Examples of environmental effects could include loss of habitat due to dams.

The energy released from food was once energy from the sun that was captured by plants in the chemical process that forms plant matter (from air and water).

Food provides animals with the materials they need for body repair and growth and the energy they need to maintain body warmth and for motion.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics.

An example of cause and effect relationships could be 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, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die.

Examples of environmental changes could include changes in land characteristics, water distribution, and other organisms.

The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Some organisms, such as fungi and bacteria, break down dead organisms (both plants and animals) and therefore operate as “decomposers.” Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. 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.

Nearly all of Earth's available water is in the ocean. Most freshwater is in glaciers or underground; only a tiny fraction is in streams, lakes, wetlands, and the atmosphere.

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, and populations of organisms. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

In multicellular animals, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues. Tissues form organs that are specialized for particular body functions.

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors.

Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources.

Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.

…Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared.

Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

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. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the water in aquatic environments.

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 its populations.

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth's terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health.

Changes in biodiversity can influence ecosystem services that humans rely on.

Natural selection leads to the predominance of certain traits in a population, and the suppression of others.

Emphasis is on using concepts of natural selection in animals, such as overproduction of offspring, passage of time, variation in a population, selection of favorable traits, and heritability of traits.

In artificial selection, humans have the capacity to influence certain characteristics of organisms by selective breeding. One can choose desired parental traits determined by genes, which are then passed to offspring.

Examples of the design process include examining human interactions and designing feasible solutions that promote stewardship.

Examples can include water usage (such as stream and river use, aquifer recharge, or dams and levee construction); land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, wetland benefits, stream reclamation, or fire restoration); and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

Technology and engineering can potentially help us best manage natural resources as populations increase.

Examples of evidence include grade-appropriate databases on human populations and the rates of consumption of food and natural resources (such as freshwater, mineral, and energy). Examples of effects can include changes made to the appearance, composition, and structure of Earth’s systems as well as the rates at which they change.