Ecosystems & Habitats
The study of ecosystems
What is ecology?
Organisms that make their own food using sunlight.
What are producers?
Environmental variables, typically biological, such as disease, competition, and predation, affect population growth rates differently depending on population density
What is a density-dependent variable?
Plants release this gas during photosynthesis.
What is oxygen?
How are proteins used in the body?
What is to rebuild and rearrange molecules/muscles?
The place where an organism lives and gets food, water, and shelter
What is a habitat?
This decreases as energy moves up a food chain.
What is available energy / 10% rule?
any variable in an environment such as space, food, or sunlight that restricts the growth, abundance, or distribution of a population within an ecosystem.
What is a limiting factor?
Burning fossil fuels increases the amount of this gas in the atmosphere.
What is carbon dioxide?
Cellular respiration releases usable energy in the form of this molecule
ATP
These are the living parts of an ecosystem.
What is biotic?
Organisms that break down dead matter and recycle nutrients.
What are decomposers?
When resources become limited, organisms must do this more often.
What is competition?
The continuous movement of carbon through living and nonliving things.
What is the carbon cycle?
What is glucose?
The role or job an organism has in an ecosystem.
What is a niche?
Energy is typically lost as this at each trophic level.
What is heat?
An ecosystem can only support a certain number of organisms called this.
What is carrying capacity?
The type of energy stored in food molecules like glucose.
What is chemical energy?
Matter is recycled through ecosystems, but this only flows in one direction.
What is energy?
When forests are removed, many organisms lose this.
What is living space?
The top level of the energy pyramid.
What is the tertiary/quaternary?
A predator population will usually decrease if this happens to its prey population.
What is the prey population decreases?
The organelle where cellular respiration occurs.
What is the mitochondria?
This type of relationship results in both animals benefiting.