Intro to Env Sci
This is the phenomenon where everyone uses a shared public resource (like a pasture or an ocean) for their own benefit until it’s completely ruined or dried up.
What is the Tragedy of the Commons?
This is the low-oxygen condition that creates the annual massive "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, chasing away or killing fish.
What is hypoxia?
This bright orange amphibian from the cloud forests of Costa Rica hasn't been seen since 1989 and is now a poster child for sudden extinction.
What is the Golden Toad?
When a volcano wipes out an entire island, leaving nothing but bare, lifeless rock, this type of slow ecological succession takes place to rebuild the community.
What is primary succession?
This grassland biome features scattered trees, warm temperatures year-round, distinct wet and dry seasons, and a lot of migrating elephants.
What is the savanna?
Environmental science is broad, but this specific sub-field focuses strictly on how living organisms interact with each other and their non-living surroundings.
What is ecology?
If a substance has a pH of 6, it is this many times more acidic than a perfectly neutral substance with a pH of 7.
What is 10 times?
This type of population growth starts out slow, skyrockets rapidly, and eventually flattens out when the population hits its carrying capacity.
What is logistic growth?
Two species of birds live in the same tree but one eats insects at the very top branches while the other eats insects near the trunk. This is an example of what?
What is resource partitioning?
This is the largest surviving tiger subspecies on Earth, currently fighting extinction in the cold, remote forests of eastern Russia.
What is the Siberian tiger (or Amur tiger)?
These two massive historical revolutions dramatically bumped up the human population because they made food easier to grow and improved medicine/technology.
What are the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions?
This major river acts like a giant funnel, washing tons of agricultural fertilizer and nutrients right down into the Gulf of Mexico every spring.
What is the Mississippi River?
This is the specific mechanism proposed by Charles Darwin where organisms with traits best suited to their environment survive and pass on their genes.
What is natural selection?
This type of organism has an incredibly massive impact on its community; if you remove it, the entire ecosystem completely collapses (like sea otters in a kelp forest)
What is a keystone species?
Even if a species bounces back in total numbers, it can still be in deep trouble if it lacks this type of diversity, leaving it vulnerable to a single disease.
What is genetic diversity?
When scientists want to publish their work, they must first pass this brutal process where other experts in the exact same field roast their data to make sure it's valid.
What is peer review?
Name the four types of biological macromolecules that make up all living things.
What are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids?
If a scientist counts 50 pine trees living in a small 2-square-mile park, they are measuring this specific population metric.
What is population density?
This is the first species to to colonize bare rock.
What is a pioneer species?
This type of graph displays a region's average monthly temperature and precipitation data on a single chart to help identify its biome.
What is a climatograph?
This is the layer of the atmosphere that holds the "good" ozone which blocks harmful UV rays from giving us skin cancer and destroying cells.
What is the stratosphere?
Because water molecules love to stick to each other and form hydrogen bonds, ice floats. Explain why floating ice is a lifesaver for fish in the winter.
What is it insulates the water underneath (preventing the whole pond from freezing solid)?
Give an example of a density-independent limiting factor that could wipe out a herd of deer regardless of how crowded they are.
What is a natural disaster? (Accept: forest fire, flood, volcanic eruption, extreme weather).
These tiny, black-and-white-striped invaders hitchhiked to the Great Lakes in the 1980s via ship ballast water and have been clogging up underwater pipes ever since.
What are zebra mussels?
This geographical term is used to discuss how biodiversity generally skyrockets as you move closer to the equator and drops off as you head toward the poles.
What is the latitudinal gradient?