Animal Nutrition & Reproduction Workshop

To get the most out of the Vertebrate Nutrition & Reproduction Workshop at the Zoo, we suggest studying the following aspects at school before the visit:

To understand the students’ interests and increase motivation about the animals:

• Collect questions that the students ask about vertebrates’ feeding and reproduction to work with later.
• Introduce Mendel’s Laws.
• Collect news articles about human and animal feeding and reproduction and discuss them in class, for example about bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
• Bring in videos, CDs or other materials on electronic supports about these issues.
• Take an outing to a food production company and then prepare a project about this issue.
• Visit a animal feed factory that has farms integrated into its production system.

As specific objectives:

• Introduce the concept of digesting food.
• Describe the food processing organs in vertebrates.
• Go into greater depth about vertebrate reproduction and discover the principal types of reproduction.
• Importance of genetic heredity.