Ecosystem Basics
This is a limited area where living and nonliving things interact.
What is an ecosystem?
This is the portion of an ecosystem that an organism uses.
What is a habitat?
This organism makes its own food, often using energy from the sun.
What is a producer?
This process allows plants to make their own food using sunlight.
What is photosynthesis?
This word describes an animal that is active at night, like a tawny frogmouth.
What is nocturnal?
This is a close relationship between two different kinds of organisms.
What is symbiosis?
These are the living parts of an ecosystem.
What are biotic factors?
This is an organism's role, or job, in an ecosystem.
What is a niche?
This organism depends on producers or other organisms for food.
What is a consumer?
This explains why there are usually fewer animals at the top of an energy pyramid.
What is less available energy at each higher level?
This is a behavior an animal is born with rather than taught.
What is an instinct?
This relationship benefits both organisms, like frogs eating insects from a water buffalo.
What is mutualism?
These are the nonliving parts of an ecosystem, such as sunlight, water, and rocks.
What are abiotic factors?
This is a characteristic that helps an organism survive in its ecosystem.
What is an adaptation?
This type of consumer eats only plants.
What is a herbivore?
This shows one path through which energy and matter are transferred in an ecosystem.
What is a food chain?
This is a behavior an animal acquires through experience or teaching.
What is a learned behavior?
This relationship benefits one organism without helping or harming the other.
What is commensalism?
This is a single living member of an ecosystem.
What is an individual?
This adaptation allows an animal to blend in with its surroundings and can help both predators and prey.
What is camouflage?
This type of consumer eats both plants and animals.
What is an omnivore?
This is formed when several food chains are linked together.
What is a food web?
This is the movement of animals from one ecosystem to another.
What is migration?
This relationship benefits one organism while harming the other.
What is parasitism?
This is all the organisms of one kind living in a particular ecosystem.
What is a population?
These tiny pores in plant leaves allow air and water to move in and out.
What are stomata?
This organism helps break down dead plants, animals, and waste, returning nutrients to the soil.
What is a decomposer?
This is the type of organism that begins a food chain.
What is a producer?
This is a deep sleep during the winter months that helps an animal conserve energy.
What is hibernation?
This is the organism that a parasite lives on or inside.
What is a host?
This includes all the populations of different kinds of organisms living in an ecosystem.
What is a community?
This happens when two or more organisms try to use the same resources.
What is competition?
This is an animal that hunts and eats other animals.
What is a predator?
This diagram shows how the amount of available energy decreases at higher feeding levels.
What is an energy pyramid?
Animals may migrate for these two reasons, such as finding food and avoiding extreme temperatures.
What are finding food or water, reproducing or raising young, or avoiding extreme temperatures? (Accept any two.)
This is the responsibility God gave people to manage and care for the world to help others and glorify Him.
What is dominion?