Ecosystem Basics
A community of organisms interacting with abiotic and biotic factors in their environment.
What is an ecosystem?
Plants depend on these two abiotic factors for photosynthesis.
What is water and sunlight?
This type of relationship involves one species benefiting and the other being harmed, like a tick on a dog.
What is parasitism?
Name one abiotic factor and one biotic factor found in coral reefs.
Abiotic: salinity
Biotic: sea urchins
This describes a system that changes over time while maintaining balance through constant interactions.
What is a dynamic system?
A lack of rainfall can cause this abiotic condition that lowers productivity and stresses populations.
Give an example of mutualism
Bees and flowers
Coral polyps and zooxanthellae algae
Organisms in coral reefs that carry out photosynthesis and provide energy to corals.
What are Zooxanthellae algae?
Give one example of an abiotic factor and one example of a biotic factor in an ecosystem.
Abiotic: sunlight; Biotic: plants
Changes in pH levels affect only abiotic factors and not living organisms.
False
Name the type of competition: lions and cheetahs competing for prey.
What is interspecific competition?
Groupers and snappers feeding on smaller fish is an example of this ecological interaction.
What is predation?
Explain how energy flows through a food chain and what happens to most of it at each level.
Energy flows from producers → consumers, with ~90% lost as heat and ~10% passed on.
Describe one way high temperatures can affect both plants and animals.
Animals: migration/death
Plants: reduced growth, flowering, or seed production
A crab hiding among coral branches for shelter, while the coral is unaffected, demonstrates this relationship.
Branching corals outcompeting slow-growing corals for space.
What is spatial competition?
Identify the role decomposers play in maintaining ecosystem stability.
They break down dead matter and recycle nutrients back into the soil.
Predict what might happen to the ecosystem balance if the soil becomes too acidic for decomposers to function.
Nutrient cycling would be disrupted, leading to reduced fertility and lower survival of producers.
Explain how predator-prey cycles help stabilize ecosystems, using foxes and rabbits as an example.
Rabbit increase → fox increase → rabbit decrease → fox decrease → balance restored.
Predict the consequence of overfishing herbivorous fish in coral reef ecosystems.
Algae would overgrow, damaging coral reefs and reducing biodiversity.