I am an Outdoor Educator at Carver Elementary School in Richmond Hill, Georgia, where my fourth and fifth grade students conduct year-long field investigations in our campus bioswale and wetland system. Using iNaturalist observations collected by students, we have built a data-driven model of our local food web in our stormwater bioswale, “the ditch.”
Our goal is to ensure the trophic assignments in this project are scientifically accurate and aligned with best ecological understanding. We would be grateful for expert eyes on the project.
Because this is a detritus-driven Coastal Plain ditch, many organisms occupy nuanced roles. We especially welcome feedback on:
Any taxa placed in the wrong trophic level
Organisms that may function differently in freshwater wetlands
Missing but expected trophic groups
Best practices for handling taxa with multiple feeding strategies
Whether our treatment of Chironomidae and crayfish is appropriate
Any Odonata life-stage considerations we should clarify
This project is part of our broader student research initiative supporting the Georgia Standards of Excellence through authentic field data. Our young scientists take this work very seriously, and we want their model to reflect real ecology as closely as possible.
We are waiting on a new microscope to document more decomposers.
Thank you in advance for helping our students strengthen their scientific research!
You might get more responses from the people you’re trying to reach if you put this in the “General” category rather than the “Educators” category. I feel like only those of us who are involved in education actually look at the “Educator” category.
Food webs are so difficult and complex because things rarely fit into discrete levels. For example, crayfish are probably detritivores, but they are also capable predators. Amphipods are tough too because they’re omnivorous - while they do contribute to the detritivorous feeders, they are also predatory on microorganisms and small invertebrates. Chironomidae contain several subfamilies known primarily as predators and some genera are actually parasites (which is essentially predation), but I suppose the majority of them are detritivores. I feel like frogs should probably be secondary consumers. They’re not eating the producers, they’re eating the primary consumers.
I do think the energy pathway seems wrong, as currently written it says Producers → Primary Consumers → Detritivores → Secondary Consumers → Tertiary Consumers
This implies that secondary consumers only eat detritivores, when they also eat primary consumers, and it also implies that detritivors eat primary consumers.
I think frogs should be listed as secondary consumers, not primary, as they eat invertebrates, not plants
I also see Nostoc commune listed as both a producer and decomposer
For taxa with multiple feeding strategies, one idea is to have your students diagram the food web showing the complexity of interactions and add it to a journal post. Maybe instead of projects, use a tag unique to your study with the different tropic levels and then tag each organism with its appropriate trophic levels so it can show up in multiple queries.
For example, you could tag the crayfish CarverEl-Detritivor, CarveEl-SecondaryConsumer and so forth.
Looking forward to the 2026 MacroBlitz contributions!
I’ll second the comment about frogs not typically being primary consumers. If a frog eats a cricket which eats plants then it’s a secondary consumer. If a frog eats a dragonfly which eats insects which eat plants, it’s a tertiary consumer. It gets complicated very quickly because most species are on multiple trophic levels (so many species will need to be in more than one project).
I also want to second the kudos for use of the white plastic spoon to isolate aquatic organisms for taking a clear photo! This is such a simple and effective idea!
Also a related project which may be of interest is this one:
i don’t see where frogs are mentioned anywhere in those projects (so i’m not sure what sort of frogs were actually observed), but it may be worth noting that at some points in their development, many larval frogs are primary consumers. so a frog might be primary, secondary, or tertiary, depending on the circumstance.
slider turtles start off life as mostly carnivores, but they become more herbivorous as they get older. so they could be primary, secondary, or tertiary, too.
my sense is that primary, secondary, and tertiary consumer classifications are meaningful only in the context of a specific food chain.
if you want to classify things without that context, it might be more useful to classify your consumers as herbivores, carnivores, or omnivores, although you still run into issue where a particular animal’s diet changes dramatically at different stages in development.
You are right! I moved the frogs. I’m trying to figure out how to sort my tadpoles vs adult frogs because they eat differently. I need to figure how to distinguish them in the project. I can’t use juveniles because that would make the project only include juveniles of every species in the project. I am going to try to use Anne’s idea of using tags. Making a project on a food web was very advantageous! It’s harder than I thought it would be!
Thank you! Using a white spoon is part of the field methods from Georgia Adopt a Stream. Another method we started using this year is using number written by a dry erase marker on a laminated piece of grid paper in the photo with the spoon. When we do aquatic macroinvertebrate surveys, we create an assembly line for each specimen’s “photoshoot for iNat.” We add the numbers to the photos with a dry erase marker so that when we go to upload each observation, we can distinguish each specimen as unique in the photo roll. Sometimes at the end of the survey, we will have 100s of photos of macroinvertebrates and they all look identical. The number helps us when we upload our observations to keep them separate. The grid is also used to show scale.
Thank you so much! We’ve worked really hard on our photography skills! My students have iPads for cameras (the Georgia GOLD grant is funding 5 iphones for us). They take all of their photos during a survey and at the end, they evaluate what gets uploaded to iNat. They delete the bad photos and then they airdrop their best ones to my device and I upload to iNat into our shared account. This has let me control the quality of photos on our account while letting kids be the photographers.
When we began, for our very first few observations, I had all students logged into our account on each device and it was a disaster! There were a lot of pictures of kids feet, selfies, and random pictures with very poor quality. We are so proud of how far we’ve come in our photography skills! We take it very seriously and work hard to be great with very limited resources.
The Georgia GOLD grant is also funding a photo printer for us so we can print our best photos and put them in a field guide made by the kids of their iNat observations.
Thank you for this suggestion! We have a fantastic video from our microscope that has a ladybug larva eating another ladybug larva and we are going to add it to this project! Our 9-11 year old students love learning about who eats whom!
Thank you! Using iNaturalist and answering “What Lives At Carver” and “How Can We Care For It?” has been the foundation of our Outdoor Education program’s conservation and stewardship actions for our National Wildlife Federation Eco-Schools Green Flag certification. We are so proud to have documented over 300 species in our schoolyard! Now that we have almost 2 years of data, our students are starting to use their own data in the classroom with their classroom teachers in math, reading, and science!
I’m going to tackle this! Great suggestion! This would be a great rainy day activity with students. We can go through each observation and identify the organism’s trophic level and tag it.
