Owls dying
by Maria Chaidez
intro
There is a problem with owls dying and also mice eating crops. It is said to be linked with farmers using poison to kill mice that eat their crops. This is linked because owls eat mice and mice that die with poison are an easy target for owls. The owls consume a big percent of poison if they eat many mice at once. This is because of bio magnification that bio magnification is the increasing concentration of a substance, such as a toxic chemical, in the tissues of organisms at successively higher levels in a food chain.
Invetsigation
Owl pellets
Owl pellets are the ball of fur and bones that owls throw up because they cant digest that. They eat rodents like mice. I dissect these owl pellets to find out what the owls ate to find out if that is the problem to why they are dying. I found out that they ate mice. And I know that mice are eating poisoned crops and becoming weak because of that they get weak and the owls are able to catch them and eat them. But because of bio magnification the owls are eating a huge amount of poison.
Disscussion
Mice eat the poisoned crops that the framers poison and owls eat about 6 mice a day and a mice eats about 50g of food a day. With these numbers I can assume that a single owl consumes about 300g of poisoned food a day. Eventually that would be a problem. So a solution to this problem could be to use environmentally friendly pesticides. My solution is better than just using dangerous chemicals because it wont have much negative effect on the environment like the chemical based pesticide.