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For my speciation lab my group had a wood tong as a food-gathering device and it is very similar to the American Oystercatcher because its beak has about the same thickness as the tong and doesn’t get thinner in the end. With its beak its able to pick and hold food inbetween the two halves of the beak.
American Oystercatchers are heterotroph because they must rely on other organisms for energy, so they aren’t able to make their own food and energy.They eat, as already the name says, oysters. But that’s not the only thing. They eat invertebrate animals such as mussels, clams, worms, mole crabs, limpets, starfish, and regular crabs. So they are carnivores because they eat only meat. This bird has a nucleus so it’s eukaryotic.
If the American Oystercatcher would become extinct, the prey would increase a lot because nothing would be eating it. But because the prey of the American Oystercatcher increased so much it wouldn’t have anything to eat after a while and then it will die out as well.
This is what would have happened to my group. Because I was the prey of the scavengers and there weren’t many scavengers, I could run around and get all the food. So I had “happy” life and could go around and eat that food but after a while my prey got extinct and I didn’t have anything to eat so my species (human) would have gotten extinct because we all wouldn’t have anything to eat.
Maybe you’re now questioning yourself the opposite of what I was just talking about. What would happen to the predator of the American Oystercatcher? Predators of Oystercatchers are large raptors. Now imagine that the American Oystercatcher gets instinct. What should the large raptors eat when there aren’t any American Oystercatcher? The answer to this question is that they would die out as well because there just is nothing else that they could eat.
It’s like a chain because then there is too much population of what normally the American Oystercatcher would eat. So these animals would get extinct because they cannot find anything to eat. And then their prey as well and that’s how it will continue until there is nothing left.
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This map shows where the American Oystercatcher lives. They live almost everywhere on beaches such as the Atlantic and the Gulf coasts of North America and south along the Pacific Coast of South America.
They live in the coast biome because the coast biome is there where the land meets the sea.
There are some protections that help the american oystercatcher. For example there are parks where the american oystercatcher is under nature conservancy and when they breed people aren't allowed to get near their nests.
But still it is not enough what people do to protect the american oystercatcher. The habitat of them is getting smaller and smaller because on the beach there are many tourist attractions and buildings where this bird cannot live. So we have to mark more areas where nobody is allowed to destroy the american oystercatcher.