Energy flow and trophic levels
What are producers?
This trophic level forms the base of every food chain and supports all others.
This force of nature powers the entire water cycle.
The Sun (or Solar Energy)?
The maximum population size that an environment can sustainably support.
What is Carrying Capacity?
Structures, like the human appendix or snake pelvic bones, that are remnants of functional features in an ancestor.
What are Vestigial Structures?
A behavior that is developmentally fixed, unlearned, and performed without prior experience.
What is Innate Behavior?
What is the significance of 10%
Only this percentage of energy passes from one trophic level to the next.
This is the major reservoir for phosphorus, as it is not found in the atmosphere.
What are Sedimentary Rocks or Soil?
The measure of the number of individuals per unit area or volume.
What is Population Density?
The type of selection that favors the intermediate traits and selects against both extreme phenotypes.
What is Stabilizing Selection?
A type of simple learning where an animal stops responding to a repeated stimulus that conveys no information.
What is Habituation?
Explain a top down ecosystem
an ecological system where the abundance and behavior of organisms at lower trophic levels (like herbivores and plants) are controlled by predators or top consumers from higher levels
The process where bacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen N2 gas into ammonia NH3
nitrogen fixation
This type of growth forms an S-shaped curve as it levels off due to limiting factors.
What is Logistic Growth?
Structures that share a common ancestry but have evolved different functions, such as the limbs of mammals.
What are Homologous Structures?
The formation of an irreversible behavioral response, such as a young animal bonding with a parent, during a critical period.
What is Imprinting?
What is multiple food chains called?
Food web
The process where water moves from plant leaves to the atmosphere as vapor.
Transpiration
A common dispersion pattern where individuals aggregate in patches, often due to resource availability.
What is Clumped Dispersion?
The evolutionary process where unrelated species evolve similar traits due to similar environments, like sharks and dolphins.
What is Convergent Evolution?
An automatic, directional movement toward or away from a stimulus, such as a cockroach running into the dark.
What is Taxis?
What are autotrophs? What is another name for them?
Organisms that use sunlight to create energy-rich molecules through the process of photosynthesis. Producers/ plants.
The human action that releases large amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere as CO2
The burning of fossil fuels
An example of a factor that regulates population growth, whose effect intensifies as the population size increases.
What are competition, disease, or predation?
The measure of an organism's reproductive success determined by its ability to survive and produce viable offspring.
What is Fitness?
An animal behavior that reduces the individual's own fitness but increases the fitness of a relative, explained by kin selection.
What is Altruism?