Owl Pellet Research Data And Results Essay, Research Paper
Over the past two weeks, we have done extensive research on the pellet of the
common barn owl. Our findings have been quite astounding. We have found that our
pellet in particular is roughly 4.5 cm long, 2.5 cm wide, and exactly 5.278
grams in weight. Compared to the other pellets researched, ours was essentially
the same from the outside, but the findings inside were quite unique. While
searching through the owl pellet, we discovered two, fully grown vole skeletons.
Finding them out wasn?t much of a daunting task, since every bone we found
happened to match up with a vole. There were no other animal bones to possibly
throw us off.
A biomass, by definition, is Plant material, vegetation, or agricultural
waste used as a fuel or energy source. Biomass is important to our research in
this study because it helps us understand how much energy the owl is taking in
compared to other animals. It also shows how much the average owl is eating, all
using the same units.
Graphs A and B are similar, yet very different at the same time. Graph A
showed only what animals the owls ate and how many of them, but Graph B showed
the amount of energy each owl had consumed, something that?s much easier to
use to compare the owls.
The evidence that shows that a food web exists is the fact that the owl may
eat everything from voles to mice, and some of these animals may eat other
animals, and those will feed on the grasses and vegetation, which may be eaten
by other animals, and so on, interlocking all of these animals into one giant
complicated food web.
The things we have gained for the real world from this project is that we
learned to work as a group together. We also learned accuracy amongst ourselves
and to create a professional level project.
My collogue and I have both taken in much knowledge from this project. We
have both found out about how much a barn owl consumes, what it consumes, how
much energy it get from that, and what it most commonly eats. We have also
learned about what a professional scientist must go through to find out
information about a simple animal. We have both gained much from this experiment