Enter Ecology Basics
What is ecology?
The study of relationships among living organisms and their environment.
What is competition?
When more than one organism uses the same resource at the same time.
What is an autotroph?
An organism that collects energy from sunlight or inorganic substances to produce food.
What is a trophic level?
Each step in a food chain or food web.
What is matter?
Anything that takes up space and has mass.
What are biotic factors?
The living factors in an organism's environment.
What is predation?
The act of one organism consuming another organism for food.
What are heterotrophs also called?
Consumers.
What is biomass?
The total mass of living matter at each trophic level.
What is a nutrient?
A chemical substance an organism must obtain from its environment to sustain life and undergo life processes.
What are abiotic factors? Give one example.
The nonliving factors in an organism's environment, such as sunlight, temperature, or rainfall.
What type of symbiotic relationship benefits both organisms?
Mutualism.
What is the ultimate energy source for most ecosystems?
The Sun
What does a pyramid of numbers represent?
The number of individual organisms at each trophic level.
What is evaporation?
The process in which liquid water is heated and changes into water vapor.
What is the difference between a habitat and a niche?
A habitat is where an organism lives; a niche is its role or position in the environment.
In which symbiotic relationship does one organism benefit while the other is neither helped nor harmed?
Commensalism.
What is a food chain?
A simple model showing how energy flows through an ecosystem.
According to the presentation, what percentage of energy is lost at each step up an energy pyramid?
90%
What process releases carbon dioxide back into the air when organisms carry out their life processes?
Cellular respiration
Put these levels of organization in order from smallest to largest:
biome, population, biosphere, organism, ecosystem, biological community.
Organism → Population → Biological community → Ecosystem → Biome → Biosphere.
A tick feeds on a dog and benefits while harming the dog. What type of relationship is this, and why?
Parasitism, because one organism benefits at the expense of another.
In this food chain, corn → grasshopper → chicken → human, identify the producer, primary consumer, secondary consumer, and tertiary consumer.
Corn = producer;
grasshopper = primary consumer;
chicken = secondary consumer;
human = tertiary consumer.
Why is less energy available at higher trophic levels?
Organisms use energy for cellular processes, and energy is released into the environment as heat.
What is a biogeochemical cycle?
The exchange and cycling of matter through the biosphere, involving living organisms, geological processes, and chemical processes.