Wild Card
Earth's Ecosystems
Food Chains, Webs, and Pyramids
Comparing Ecosystems
Changes in Ecosystems
100

The two primary components of climate.

What are precipitation and temperature?

100

All the populations that live in a particular area.

What is a community?

100

A model that shows the path of energy in food within an ecosystem.

What is a food chain?

100

A biome characterized by low precipitation.

What is a desert?

100

The first group of organisms that appear during the process of succession.

What is the pioneer community?

200

A group of llamas living in the Andes Mountains would be considered this.

What is a population?

200

The role an organism plays in its community.

What is a niche?

200

A model that explains why there are always more producers than consumers in an ecosystem.

What is an energy pyramid?

200

A very cold and dry biome with permafrost.

What is a tundra?

200

This controls the size and growth of a population.

What is a limiting factor?

300

A worm acts as this type of organism when it breaks down the remains of dead organisms.

What is a decomposer?

300

The type of symbiotic relationship when one organism benefits and the other is not harmed.

What is commensalism?

300

This is needed to recycle energy from the top of the food chain back to the bottom?

What is a decomposer?

300

The biome with the greatest biodiversity.

What is a tropical rainforest?

300

Succession stops when this has been reached.

What is a climax community?

400

This type of animal eats dead animals but it does not hunt or kill them itself.

What is a scavenger?

400

In this cycle, something has to be "fixed" in order to be usable for organisms. 

What is the nitrogen cycle?

400

A snake eats a bird. What is the level of classification of the snake in a food chain?

What is a tertiary consumer?

400

This fluctuates in an estuary and makes it a unique ecosystem.

What is the salt level (salinity)?

400

The condition of a species whose numbers have declined.

What is threatened?

500

The difference between a tropical and temperate rain forest.

Temperate rainforests have less rainfall and tropical rainforests have warmer temperatures.

500

The attempt by organisms to obtain a resource that is available in a limited supply.

What is competition?

500

Each level of the energy pyramid decreases in energy by a certain percentage. If the bottom level of the pyramid has 10,000 kcal of energy, what is the amount of energy in the level above it?

What is 1000 kcal of energy?

500

This information is needed to distinguish between a desert and a tundra.

What is temperature?

500

The difference between primary and secondary succession?

Primary succession occurs in an area with no existing communities. Secondary succession occurs where a community previously existed.