This afternoon, Ms. Jen Schnelle led our two Environmental Science classes in an outdoors ecosystems lab where the students simulated organisms from different levels of an ecosystem's food web. The students experienced three different environmental conditions - a normal, balanced ecosystem, a system contaminated with parasites, and an ecosystem that was top heavy with apex predators. The students got to put themselves in the mindsets of organisms in nature by trying to collect enough water and/or food each scenario in order to survive, and learned more about how organisms think about survival in the natural world.