Ecology Basics
The maximum number of individuals an environment can support.
What is carrying capacity?
A group of individuals of the same species living in the same area.
What is a population?
Deforestation contributes to climate change by reducing the number of these carbon-storing organisms.
Deforestation contributes to climate change by reducing the number of these carbon-storing organisms.
These are the three broadest groups in the modern classification system.
What are domains?
Viruses are not considered living because they lack this cell structure.
What is a cell membrane (or cellular structure)?
This term describes how energy is passed from producers to top predators.
What is a food chain?
This type of ecological succession starts in an area with no soil, such as after a volcanic eruption.
What is primary succession?
Plants take in this form of carbon during photosynthesis.
What is carbon dioxide (CO₂)?
A diagram that shows evolutionary relationships between species based on shared traits.
What is a cladogram?
This must happen for a virus to reproduce.
What is infecting a host cell?
The process by which toxic substances increase in concentration as they move up the food chain.
What is biomagnification?
This curve levels off when a population reaches carrying capacity.
What is a logistic growth curve?
This human activity is the largest contributor to increased atmospheric carbon.
What is burning fossil fuels?
A group on a cladogram that includes an ancestor and all its descendants.
What is a clade?
The genetic material in a virus can be either of these two types.
What is DNA or RNA?
A large-scale effect in an ecosystem caused by changes in one trophic level, like removing a top predator.
What is a trophic cascade?
The early species that colonize barren land in primary succession.
What are pioneer species?
This process returns carbon to the atmosphere from living things.
What is cellular respiration?
This domain includes organisms with nuclei in their cells.
What is Eukarya?
The outer protein coat of a virus is called this.
What is a capsid?
The relative amount of energy transfer through a food chain.
What is 10%?
This kind of limiting factor becomes stronger as a population grows, including competition, disease, and predation.
What is a density-dependent limiting factor?
This global process is driven by the enhanced greenhouse effect caused by extra CO₂.
What is climate change?
Traits that are shared due to common ancestry are called this.
What are homologous traits?
Vaccines protect against viruses by training this system to recognize them.
What is the immune system?