Key Terms and Key Phrases
The living and nonliving things that can be found in one place.
What is: Ecosystem
Define Habitat
The physical place where a population or organism lives
Briefly explain how predators and prey keep one another from overpopulating.
What is: Too many predators and they run low on prey and starve, too much prey and predators hunt more of them until they're stable.
Nonliving parts of an ecosystem.
What is: Abiotic Factors
Define Niche
The unique ways an organism survives, obtains food and shelter, and avoids danger in its habitat.
Briefly explain population density
What is: The number of organisms that live in an area relative to the space there is.
Explain the difference between a food chain and a food web.
What is: A food chain shows the flow of energy in a single line of events as organisms eat one another, a food web shows ALL the food chains that can happen in an ecosystem
Define Biotic Potential
What is: The potential growth of a population if it could grow in perfect conditions with no limiting factors.
Name the four types of consumers.
What are: Consumers, Herbivores, Omnivores, Decomposers.
Describes the demand for resources, such as food, water, and shelter in short supply in a community.
What is: Competition
Define Symbiotic Relationship
What is: A relationship in which two different species live together and interact closely over a period of time.
Name the five abiotic factors of an ecosystem.
What are: Water, light, temperature, atmosphere, and soil
Name the difference between a community and a population
What is: Population refers to all the members of a single species in the area, Community refers to all the populations living in an ecosystem at the same time.
Define Carrying Capacity
What is: The largest number of individuals of one species that an ecosystem can support over time.
Name and describe the three types of symbiotic relationships.
What are:
+Mutualism, which refers to a relationship in which two species in a community benefit from a relationship.
+Parasitism, which refers to one species (the parasite) benefitting while another species (the host) is harmed.
+Commensalism, which refers to one species benefitting from a relationship while the other is neither harmed nor helped.