Layers of Organization & Biomes
A single individual living thing (one frog, one oak tree, one bacterium) is called this.
What is an organism?
When a species is brought to a new ecosystem where it has no natural predators, it can crowd out native species and take over. These species are called this.
What are invasive species?
Without these organisms, dead plants and animals would pile up forever and nutrients would never return to the soil. Mushrooms, bacteria, and earthworms all belong to this group.
What are decomposers?
As the predator population is hitting its maximum capacity, we expect the prey population to be (going up or going down?)
Going down
The non-living parts of an ecosystem (sunlight, water, soil, and temperature) are called these.
What are abiotic factors?
In 1987, this bird was down to just 27 individuals left on Earth. Scientists made the controversial decision to capture every last wild one and start a captive breeding program. Today there are over 500, though the species is still threatened by lead poisoning from bullet fragments left in animal carcasses by hunters.
What is the California condor?
A meadow has 10,000 energy units in its grass. A rabbit eats the grass. A fox eats the rabbit. Using the 10% rule, how many energy units does the fox receive?
What is 100 units? (10,000 → 1,000 → 100)
In order for a trait to be favored by natural selection, it must help an individual both survive and do this other thing.
Reproduce
This is where Mr Connor went to college.
UC Davis
This biome gets less than 10 inches of rain per year and has extreme temperature swings between day and night as well as Summer and Winter.
What is the desert?
This process is because of rising CO₂ in our atmosphere is being absorbed by the ocean, making seawater more acidic and bleaching the coral reefs.
What is ocean acidification?
A rabbit eats only plants. A fox eats the rabbits. Hawks eat the foxes. Hawks are an example of this level of the food chain.
What is a tertiary consumer?
An animal that focuses on having fewer children, taking longer to develop them, but investing more energy into raising/protecting them is called this letter.
K selected
This is Mr. Connor's age.
29 years old
This ecological layer includes every different species living together in the same area, not just one kind of animal, but all of them together.
What is a community?
In 2010, an explosion on an offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico released nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil — the largest accidental offshore oil spill in history. This disaster is named after the oil company responsible.
What is the BP oil spill (or Deepwater Horizon)?
Sea otters eat sea urchins. When otters were hunted nearly to extinction, urchins exploded in number and ate all the kelp forests. Without kelp, hundreds of other species lost their habitat. The sea otter is an example of this type of species.
What is a keystone species?
Over many generations, giraffes with longer necks reached more food and had more offspring who also had long necks. Short-necked giraffes slowly disappeared. The population shift towards this one extreme trait is called what kind of selection?
What is directional selection?
Beach Volleyball
This biome covers only 6% of Earth's land surface but contains over half of all plant and animal species on the planet. It rains almost every single day, and it has 4 distinct layers (bonus if you can name the 4 layers)
What is the tropical rainforest?
Swine farms in China produce enormous amounts of waste that is rich with this chemical that causes algal blooms.
What is phosphorus?
Using the 10% rule: grass at the bottom of a food chain has 100,000 energy units. At the very top of the chain, only 10 energy units are available. How many trophic levels does this food chain have?
What is 5 trophic levels? (100,000 → 10,000 → 1,000 → 100 → 10)
The birds have three beak sizes (small but long, medium but short, and large but short).
The only food available is small little seeds buried deep within hard shells, and large nuts.
Only the small beaked birds can eat the seeds, and only the large beaked birds can eat the nuts.What kind of selection might occur?
What is disruptive selection?
What is Mr Connor doing at approximately 4:00pm today?
Running a mile on the track