Ecosystems 1
What is a biotic factor?
A biotic factor is a living thing in an ecosystem
Biotic factors include corals, sea jellies, whales and seabirds.
What is a producer?
An organism that makes its own food by harnessing sunlight energy.
Producers store the Sun's energy via photosynthesis, providing food for consumers.
What do the arrows represent in a food chain or food web?
They show the flow of energy from one organism to the next.
What is a herbivore?
A herbivore is an animal that eats only plants.
What are the 3 types of plate movements?
Convergent, divergent and transform.
Give 3 examples of abiotic factors.
Abiotic factors are the non-living things in an ecosystem.
Abiotic factors include sunlight, temperatire, water, sand and rocks.
Explain what a decomposer does
A decomposer is an organism that breaks down dead matter by releasing chemicals.
For example, sea cucumbers decompose waste and dead matter on the sea floor.
What is a food web? Give an example.
A food web is built by connecting all the food chains in a particular ecosystem to show how energy is transferred between orgnaisms.
Photosynthesis is the reaction in producers that transforms light energy into chemical energy
Photosynthesis produces sugar molecules that store chemical energy to support life processes.
Describe 1 unique feature of Primary Seismic waves (P-waves)
P-waves:
They are longitudinal so they cause the ground to move up and down
They can pass through solids and liquids
They go faster than S waves.
Describe an ecosystem
A collection of organisms interacting with each other and their environment.
A coral reef ecosystem includes a wide variety of living things and their non-living environment.
What is a tropic level?
A tropic level in an ecosystem shows organisms that share the same function in the food chain and the same nutritional relationship to the primary sources of energy.
For example, sheep, cows and goats are all primary consumers. They eat producers (grass) as they are all herbivores.
How can we calculate how energy flows through an ecosystem?
Only 10% of all energy is passed up through an ecosystem.
For example, if a producer made 1000 calories the next tropic levels would get:
Primary consumer: 100 calories
Secondary consumer: 10 calories
Tertiary consumer: 1 calorie
Define carnivore and omnivore
A carnivore eats only meat.
An omnivore eats both plants and animals.
Describe 2 unique features of Secondary Seismic waves (S-waves)
S waves
They are tranSverse so they cause the ground to Shake from right to left
They ONLY pass through Solids
They are Slower than P waves
They go faster through more dense material
What is a parasite?
An organism that has a relationship with another where the parasite benefits while the other species is harmed
Lampreys (small fish) use their curved teeth to latch on to another fish and then suck the blood of their victims.
List 3 factors impact the size of a population?
Food availability, predator population, diseases, migration, birth rate.
What would happen if you remove a primary consumer out of an ecosystem?
You would have an overgrowth of producers, as the primary consumer is not there to eat it.
The secondary consumer would go hungry as its food source has been removed from the ecosystem, and population numbers would drop.
Where does energy come from?
Producers get energy from sunlight, while consumers get energy by eating other organisms.
Energy gives organisms the ability to move, grow and function.
How does seafloor spreading occur?
Seafloor spreading takes place at midocean ridges where new ocean floor is created as molten material from the earth's mantle rises in between plates and spreads out.
What does a predator-prey graph show?
A graph showing changes in the numbers of predators and prey.
When the number of prey increases, the number of predators increases because of the abundance of food.
Explain predator-prey relationships
The populations of predators and prey are linked.
In the predator prey relationship, one species is feeding on the other species. The prey species is the animal being fed on, and the predator is the animal being fed.
When the prey relationship rises, the predator relationship will also rise, as there is abundant food.
Explain with examples the process of eutrophication?
Eutrophication is when a body of water becomes overly enriched with minerals and nutrients (such as from fertilisers) which induce excessive growth of algae. This process may result in oxygen depletion of the water body.
This is how algal blooms happen in bodies of water.
What is the difference between the words ecology and ecosystem?
Ecology is the scientific study of ecosystems, a branch of biology. Ecologists investigate the relationships between organisms in an ecosystem and their dependence on non-living things.
An ecosystem is a collection of organisms interacting with each other and their environment. A coral reef ecosystem includes a wide variety of living things and their non-living environment.
What happens at the sites where subduction occurs?
Subduction occurs at the convergent boundaries of tectonic plates. Here, one plate moves under another and is forced to sink towards the mantle. This pressure from this process can create volcanic mountains.