Key Terms/Defintions
This is the name for a place where species or a community of species live.
What is a habitat?
This is the term for a species in a food chain that makes its own food, with energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil.
What is a producer?
These are the two main groups animals are divided into based on whether or not they have a backbone.
What are vertebrates and invertebrates?
This term refers to non-native organisms introduced to an ecosystem that cause economic or environmental harm.
What is an invasive species?
The Red Panda, Giant Panda, Blue Whale, and White Rhino are all examples of species facing this threat of dying out.
What is being endangered or extinct?
A singular living thing (plant or animal).
What is an organism?
This type of organism only eats producers.
What is a primary consumer or a herbivore?
Animals like owls, cows, humans, and lions belong to this trophic classification because they must eat other organisms to obtain energy.
What are consumers?
Invasive species often multiply rapidly because they lack these natural controls in their new environment.
What are natural predators?
This key issue occurs when an ecosystem loses a wide variety of plant and animal species, making the ecosystem less resilient.
What is a loss of biodiversity?
The term for a group of the same organism.
What is a species?
This type of organism will eat primary consumers. Example: A snake eats mice.
What is a secondary consumer?
Organisms such as worms, mushrooms, fungi, and bacteria fall into this category because they break down dead or decaying organic matter.
What are decomposers?
When seeds or organisms spread into non-native regions and outcompete local flora for resources like soil and sunlight, it threatens local species in this way.
What is competition for resources?
Large mammals such as polar bears and elephants are heavily impacted by habitat loss and climate change, placing them on this protective list.
What is being endangered?
The diversity of living things in a given area?
What is biodiversity?
This is the term for a species that does not have any natural predators?
What is an apex predator?
Aquatic vertebrates that possess gills and fins, living entirely in water as consumers.
What are fish?
An invasive species can alter food web dynamics by overconsuming organisms at this level, starving native secondary consumers.
What are primary consumers (or producers)?
Disruption at the bottom of a food chain—such as the loss of primary producers—can cause this widespread effect on all higher consumers.
What is a collapse of the food web?
An animal that has a backbone or spine is known as what?
Bacteria and fungi are both examples of this type of organism.
What are decomposers?
Cold-blooded, air-breathing vertebrates covered in scales or scutes that rely on other organisms for energy.
What are reptiles?
This invasive reptile, accidentally introduced to North American wetlands like the Everglades, severely threatens native biodiversity by preying on local birds, mammals, and even alligators.
What is the Burmese Python
Human activities like deforestation, pollution, and urban expansion lead directly to this primary driver of species endangerment.
What is habitat destruction/or habitat loss?