Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Vocabulary
Section 1:
Symbioses - the five major types of close interactions.
Predator - captures, kills, and consumes another individual.
Prey - individual hunted by the predator(s).
Mimicry - a defense in which a harmless species resembles a
poisonous or distasteful species.
Herbivores - animals that eat plants.
Secondary Compounds - chemicals from products of a plant's
metabolism.
Parasitism - a species interaction that resembles predation in that
one individual is harmed while the other individual benefits.
Parasite - the individual in parasitism that feeds on another
individual.
Host - the individual that the parasite feeds on.
Ectoparasites - external parasites; they live on their host but do
not enter the host's body.
Endoparasites - internal parasites; they live inside the host's body.
Competition - results from fundamental niche overlap; the use of
the same limited resource by two or more species.
Competitive Exclusion - principle used by ecologists to describe
situations in which one species is eliminated from a community
because of competition for the same limited resource.
Character Displacement - in which the ranges of potential
competitors overlap.
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Vocabulary
Section 1:
Producers - manufacture their own food (autotrophs).
Chemosynthesis - process that bacteria carry out, which means
they produce carbohydrates by using energy from inorganic
molecules.
Gross Primary Productivity - the rate at which producers in an
ecosystem capture energy.
Biomass - term used by ecologists to refer to the organic material
in an ecosystem.
Net Primary Productivity - rate at which biomass accumulates.
Consumers - obtain energy by eating other organisms or organic
wastes (heterotrophs).
Herbivores - eat producers.
Carnivores - eat other consumers.
Omnivores - eat both producers and consumers.
Detritivores - consumers that feed on the "garbage" of an
ecosystem.
Decomposers - break down the complex molecules in dead
tissues and wastes into simpler molecules.
Trophic Level - indicates an organism's position in the sequence of
energy transfers (as seen in figure 1).
Food Chain - a single pathway of feeding relationships among
organisms in an ecosystem that results in energy transfer (as
seen in figure 2).
Food Web - the interrelated food chains in an ecosystem (as seen
in figure 3).
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Section 2:
Ground Water - water in the soil of in underground formations of
porous rock.
Water Cycle - the movement of water between reservoirs (see
figure 1).
Transpiration - in which plants take in water through their roots,
and they release water and take in carbon dioxide through the
stomata in their leaves.
Carbon Cycle - (see figure 2)
Nitrogen Cycle - the complex pathway that nitrogen follows within
an ecosystem (see figure 3).
Nitrogen Fixation - process of converting nitrogen gas to nitrate.
Nitrogen-fixing Bacteria - convert nitrogen gas into ammonia,
then nitrite, and then nitrate, which plants can use.
Ammonification - process in which decomposers break down the
corpses and wastes of organisms and release the nitrogen they
contain as ammonia.
Nitrification - process in which bacteria in the soil take up
ammonia and oxidize it into nitrites and nitrates.
Denitrification - occurs when anaerobic bacteria break down
nitrates and release nitrogen gas back into the atmosphere.
Section 3:
Biomes - very large terrestrial ecosystems that contain a number
of smaller but related ecosystems within them.
Tundra - a cold and largely treeless biome that forms a continuous
belt across northern North America, Europe, and Asia.
Permafrost - a permanently frozen layer of soil under the surface.
Taiga - a forested biome dominated by cone-bearing evergreen
trees, such as pines, firs, hemlock, and spruce.
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8
Lauren Markish
Period 7/8