Who Ate the Penguin? An Ocean Food Chain

Defining “food chain” as: “The plants and animals linked together by what eats what”, the four books in Crabtree’s “Follow the Food Chain” each take young readers to a different ecosystem and follow one food chain in that particular geographic setting. Each book begins in essentially the same fashion by stating:

All living things need food to give them energy to live. Plants make their own food using energy from sunlight, air, soil, and water.

Animals cannot make their own food. They eat plants or other animals to survive....
Plants and animals are linked together by many different food chains. This book looks at a ....”

To assist readers in visualizing each book’s food chain, the series’ designer has incorporated a diagram consisting of a linear series of circles that are connected by arrows moving from left to right. Accompanying text explains, “In a food chain, an arrow shows the food energy moving from one living thing to another.” The six or seven circles each contain only a question mark until it needs to be filled in because it is the next link in the chain. In all four books, the first visual is the sun while the second will be some form of plant. The final animal to be found in a circle is the top predator in that particular ecosystem.

Who Ate the Penguin? An Ocean Food Chain is set in Antarctica. Following the sun image, the chain continues with plankton, Antarctic krill, bald notothen fish, a gentoo penguin, a leopard seal and Antarctica’s top ocean predator, the killer whale. Lest readers think that a particular link’s diet is limited to what came below it in the food chain, Ridley adds clarifying text. For example, though the leopard seal did eat the penguin, penguins are not the leopard seal’s sole dietary choice. “[A leopard seal] eats many animals, including krill, squid, fish, [and] seal pups.” Like Who Ate the Snake?, Who Ate the Penguin? seems to momentarily lose its food chain focus. After Ridley establishes the fish/penguin link in the food chain, she digresses in a chapter called “Feeding penguin chicks” before returning to answering the book’s title question.

Each book in the “Follow the Food Chain” series has a form of review chapter in which the circles, now numbered and containing their visuals, are repeated, and readers are invited to identify each link in the chain. The final chapter reminds readers that the links in a food chain links can change depending upon where the ecosystem is found. As well, this section considers threats to the books’ food chains. For Who Ate the Penguin?, Ridley, in addition to global warming, identifies that:

There are many threats to Antarctic food chains. Fishing boats in Antarctica catch a lot of krill. This leaves less for penguins, seals, whales, fish, squid, and sea birds to eat.

Like other Crabtree series, “Follow the Food Chain” utilizes facing page chapters that contain brief text supported by full-colour photos and diagrams. The books’ final page is shared by a glossary labelled “Useful Words” (which defines words that had been bolded in the main text) and an index. Though not accessible at the time of this review, teacher guides will be available in the future via the QR code on the back of the book or by going to www.crabtreebooks.com/resource/teachers-guides.

Despite the digression to feed the penguin chicks, overall the simple, straightforward text of Who Ate the Penguin? An Ocean Food Chain, well-supplemented by numerous illustrations, offers students excellent information while effectively modelling how they could construct their own food chains.