Who Eats Whom?
Organisms that produce their own food using sunlight through processes like photosynthesis.
What are producers?
A symbiotic relationship in which both involved organisms benefit from the interaction.
What is mutualism?
What the arrows in a food chain or food web represent as they point from one organism to another.
What is the flow/transfer of energy?
The level at the base of an energy pyramid that contains the greatest amount of available energy.
What are producers?
The specific process in the water cycle where water evaporates directly from plant leaves into the atmosphere.
What is transpiration?
An organism that obtains energy by breaking down dead organic material and returning nutrients to the soil.
What is a decomposer?
A relationship in which one organism benefits while harming the host organism.
What is parasitism?
In a food chain where a bluebird eats a worm, the category of consumer the bluebird represents.
What is a secondary consumer?
What happens to the amount of available energy as you move up from one trophic level to the next higher level.
The two biological processes in the carbon cycle where plants absorb CO2 and living things release CO2 back into the air.
What are photosynthesis and respiration?
An animal whose regular diet consists of both plants and other animals.
What is an omnivore?
A symbiotic relationship where one organism benefits and the other is unaffected.
What is commensalism?
What happens to a primary consumer if the secondary consumer population suddenly drops?
This is how much energy is retained as you move up the pyramid each level.
What is 10%?
The process in the carbon cycle that releases carbon dioxide when wood or fossil fuels are burned.
What is combustion?
Animals like caterpillars, ants, or rabbits that feed exclusively on producers.
What are herbivores (or primary consumers)?
An interaction where organisms work together toward a shared survival goal, such as hunting in a pack.
What is cooperation?
An organism like a frog that eats grasshoppers and gets eaten by hawks fills both of these interaction roles.
What are predator and prey?
Where most of the energy goes that is NOT passed along to the next level of the energy pyramid.
The process triggered when excess fertilizer runoff leads to algae blooms, blocking light and removing oxygen from water.
What is eutrophication?
The general term for any organism that must consume other living organisms to obtain energy.
What is a consumer?
The interaction that occurs when organisms attempt to use the same limited resource, such as food, water, or territory.
What is competition?
The main structural difference between a single food chain and a food web.
What is a food chain shows one single pathway of energy, while a food web connects multiple pathways?
The fundamental difference between how energy moves through an ecosystem compared to how matter moves.
What is energy flows in a one-way direction while matter cycles/reuses?
The direct effect on a prey population when its main top predator is completely removed from an ecosystem.
What is an increase in the prey population?