Roles in an Ecosystem
The most important role of these organisms is to release essential nutrients back into the soil and water after they break down dead things.
What are decomposers?
The type of organism, like algae or marsh grass, that creates its own food using the sun's energy through photosynthesis.
What is a producer?
This type of species is introduced (sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose), and then out-competes or preys upon native species in the ecosystem.
What is an invasive species?
What you can do after removing invasive plants in an area in order to restore the ecosystem.
What is replant native plants?
These massive, luminous balls of plasma are the primary building blocks of galaxies and the one closest to us is the source of all energy on our planet.
What is a star?
In a food web, this type of consumer eats primary consumers, but is often eaten by tertiary consumers.
What is a secondary consumer?
Amphibians, such as frogs, need this type of environment because they must lay their eggs in water and absorb oxygen through their moist skin.
What is a wetland (or marsh)?
This pollution source occurs when rain washes oil, fertilizer, and trash from city streets into storm drains.
What is runoff pollution?
One method used to fight overfishing that limits the number of fish allowed to be caught by different countries or companies.
What are fishing quotas?
A vast, rotating collection of gas, dust, billions of stars, and their solar systems, often classified as spiral, elliptical, or irregular.
What is a galaxy?
An organism that eats only plants or algae, making it a primary consumer.
What is a herbivore?
This essential gas is mixed into the lake water, and its depletion can lead to fish dying in a dead zone.
What is Dissolved Oxygen (DO)?
This threat removes fish faster than they can reproduce, causing the population to crash and destabilizing the food web.
What is overfishing?
This South American country was the first in the world to write the Rights of Nature into its constitution.
What is Ecuador?
Huge formations that can contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies, making them the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe.
What are galaxy clusters?
This complex model, which shows multiple overlapping food chains, is a more accurate way to represent energy flow in an ecosystem.
What is a food web?
The ecological term for the chain reaction when removing too many of one organism—like a certain type of small fish—causes a collapse in the population of the bird that eats it.
What is the domino effect (or trophic cascade)?
This destructive growth is often caused by an excess of nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, from fertilizer and pet waste entering the water.
What is an algae bloom?
The practice of managing forests to meet human needs for resources like timber while also maintaining the forest's long-term health, biodiversity, and ecological balance
What is sustainable forestry?
This term defines the part of the universe that is, in principle, detectable from Earth, limited by the speed of light and the age of the universe.
What is the observable universe?
The term for an animal at the very top of a food chain that has no natural predators in its ecosystem.
What is an apex predator?
Historically, Lake Merritt's current location was not a lake but a large, complex area of this water-based habitat before it was developed. (Hint: a fancier way of saying "wetland")
What is a tidal slough?
Historically, this action, which involves replacing natural habitats with concrete and urban development, is why Lake Merritt lost most of its original salt marsh.
What is habitat destruction?
Ways to reduce runoff of agricultural fertilizers into the waterways.
What is precision agriculture (using only as much fertilizer as needed) / using cover crops or rotating crops (to maintain soil health) / creating bioretention zones or constructed wetlands as buffer zones to absorb excess nutrients before they reach the water?
This is the official classification for a celestial body that orbits the Sun, has sufficient mass for a nearly round shape, but has not been able to clear their orbit of debris.
What is a dwarf planet?