Ecosystem Basics
This is a community of living organisms and nonliving factors in a certain area.
What is an ecosystem?
This is vital for all living things in an ecosystem.
What is energy?
These organisms get energy by eating other living things.
What are consumers?
This species has a disproportionately large impact on its ecosystem relative to its abundance.
What is a keystone species?
This shows energy flow through one feeding path.
What is a food chain?
Examples include kelp forest, rocky coastline, or open ocean.
What are ecosystems?
Producers, consumers, and decomposers obtain energy in these three different ways.
What are making their own food, eating other organisms, and breaking down dead matter?
This type of consumer eats plants, such as sea urchins and kelp crabs.
What are herbivores?
Removing this species can cause drastic shifts like kelp forest collapse into urchin barrens.
What is the keystone species (such as the sea otter)?
This shows many interconnected feeding relationships.
What is a food web?
These are the two types of factors that make up an ecosystem.
What are biotic and abiotic factors?
Producers make their own food through this process using sunlight.
What is photosynthesis?
This type of consumer eats meat, such as sea otters and sea stars.
What are carnivores?
These are the three major types of ecological interactions: predation, competition, and this.
What is symbiosis?
Kelp forest food webs are considered this because of many overlapping chains
What is complex?
These factors refer to living things, while these refer to nonliving things.
What are biotic and abiotic factors?
Producers like kelp are considered this because they support the entire food web.
What is the base?
This consumer type eats both plants and animals, such as fish.
What are omnivores?
This interaction involves one organism killing and eating another, such as sea otters preying on sea urchins.
What is predation?
Predation helps maintain this by controlling prey populations.
What is biodiversity?
These two ecosystems can both persist as stable systems within the same environment, illustrating balance.
What are kelp forests and urchin barrens?
These organisms break down dead matter and waste, recycling nutrients back into the ecosystem.
What are decomposers?
Consumers contribute to energy flow by doing this within the ecosystem.
What is transferring energy by eating other organisms?
In symbiosis, this type benefits both species, while this benefits one without harming or helping the other, and this benefits one while harming the other.
What are mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism?
Removing a keystone species like the sea otter may cause this drastic ecosystem change.
What is the collapse of kelp forests into urchin barrens?