Antarctic Presentation Reflection

There are many different predators in the Antarctic. Although Mr. Watts didn't really talk about them very much, the orcas are at the top of the food chain. After them come the seals - the leopard seals, the crab-eater seals, and the elephant seals. These seals tend to eat a couple of different seals. The leopard seal eats the biggest food because it is the leanest and the fastest - it eats krill, squids, penguins, and sometimes even other seals! The mother seals are the ones that are the most ferocious - you do NOT want to mess with them. The male seals even sing sometimes to get their attention!
At the bottom of the food chain is the krill. The krill is the most abundant animal in the Antarctic and also one of the smallest. The only thing that is lower on the food chain than krill is algae, because even krill need something to eat! Almost all other animals eat krill, because they are simply the easiest to catch.
The animals from the Antarctic migrate once the weather starts to change. In the Winter (Summer for us), it is so cold there that basically no living thing can survive (or very few). Once it is Spring, the seals and the penguins come out, and the place just starts swarming with life. Also, the algae becomes more abundant once the animals come out. We have the whales to thank for that. :)
Most animals go by weather to determine whether it's right to reproduce. A big factor in this is how much food is available to them. They don't want to reproduce if they don't have enough food to feed the babies! That's why most penguins reproduce before summer starts properly, because they want the prey to be thriving and more than enough food for the babies to be available. Seals especially want there to be enough prey for their pups, because they store all the fat they can before the Winter.
There are many adaptations that animals in the Arctic have, but one of the more important ones is blubber. Blubber is a thick layer of fat around a body that keeps the animal warm and allows it to survive. Both seals and whales have large amounts of blubber, and it is one of the main things that they depend on in order to survive.
Instead of blubber, penguins and some other animals huddle together to create heat by sharing each others body heat. The males huddle around the outside and take turns going to the inside where it is so warm that sometimes the penguins have a hard time keeping themselves cool enough! This proves that there are more than one way of keeping body heat - animals don't necessarily need to pack on fat.
What some of the faster animals have as an adaption is speed. The leopard seals especially are very fast and very dangerous, and this allows them to capture SO much more prey than penguins, for example.
An example of an interesting mating ritual is from the leopard seals. Because the female is the dominant one, the male has to sing to the female in order to attract her. Sometimes, if the male doesn't sing nicely enough, the female will kill him. According to Mr. Watts, this is a really. That is something I would like to hear someday - I looked it up online but I couldn't find it.
A way that penguins ensure survival of their species is by testing their young. I personally really do not like to think about this because I think it is cruel, but it is what they have to do in order to survive! If the food is scarce, the penguin mother will take her babies and see which one is the strongest. She then abandons the weaker one and feeds the stronger one, ensuring its survival.
On the other hand, a seal mother often risks a lot in order to feed her pups. They feed on her and feed until they become as fat as their mother was, and then the mother is think again and must hunt for a lot of prey in order to store more blubber.

I thought this presentation was an amazing experience because it was like a different world(although, in reality, it was just a different biome)! I think it's really good that the species are so abundant there currently, and I truly hope that we don't mess things up anymore for what is the least-disturbed spot on the planet. Also, I hope we find a way to at least slow down the melting of the ice-caps, because if it progresses the way it is now or gets even worse, a whole biome will just disappear.
This presentation also helped me learn A LOT about the unit at hand and how biomes and ecosystems work. It helped me learn a lot about the food chain and how animals ensure their survival. It also helped me learn a lot about how some animals react with other animals, and how there are both predators and prey in every ecosystem.