Transcript
Page 1: Principles of Ecology

Principles of Ecology

Section 13.1: Ecologists Study Relationships (Part 1)

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Unit Objectives

• To be able to summarize the levels of organization that ecologists study.

• To be able to describe and apply research methods ecologists use to study the environment.

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Get Lab Notebooks

• I need you to get a lab notebook for class by next Monday (Sept. 9)

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Ecology- The Science of Life’s Interconnectedness

• Ecology – the study of the relationships among living things and their surroundings (including abiotic – non-living - things such as water, climate, minerals, and other non-living parts of an organism’s surroundings).

• Ecology comes from the Greek work Oikos, which means house.

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Ernst Haeckel

• A German zoologist and evolutionary biologist who coined the term ecology.

• Wanted to encourage biologists to study the ways organisms interact.

• Saw that nature was complexand its relationships needed to bestudied.

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Levels of Life

• Ecology gives order to the world and allows us to better understand it. We break it down into levels:

• Organism – an individual living thing.• Population – a group of the same species living in

one area (a population of tigers, frogs in a pond, or lady slipper orchids on a tallgrass prairie remnant.

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Levels of Life

• Community – A group of different species living together in one area.

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Ecosystem• Includes all organisms, as well as abiotic elements

(e.g. soil, climate, water, rocks, etc.) in an area.• Can be large or small.– The insides of a hollow tree or an ecosystem on a

much larger scale (e.g. oak/hickory and boreal forests, coral reefs, prairie potholes, etc.)

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Biome

• A major regional or global community of organisms. – Typically characterized by climatic conditions and

plant communities (tropical rain forests, tallgrass prairie, and tropical savannah).

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More Biomes

Mississippi River Delta Estuary

Montane rainforest, Colombian Andes

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Example: Salmon

• What role do Pacific salmon play in their ecosystems?

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Salmon and their ecosystem

• Over 140 species utilize the Pacific salmon for food.

• If not eaten, then their bodies decay and return essential nutrients to the rivers where they spawn.

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An ecosystem at risk . . .

• Due to profound changes to their environment, 214 species of Pacific salmon (and relatives like steelhead) are threatened with extinction – 106 are already extinct.– Population declines due to:

1. Dams (unable to reach spawning grounds).2. Polluted rivers from mining, logging and other

industries.3. The commercial salmon industry.

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Example: Bison

How are bison like Pacific salmon?

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Bison, the center of their ecosystem

The bison were (and hopefully will be again) the prairie’s keystone species. They were hunted

nearly to extinction.

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Example: Bats

• Bats are essential to ecosystems around the world.

• In the tropics, ecosystems would collapse without bats who pollinate plants and disperse seeds – allowing for forests and 1,000s of plant species to regenerate.

• 300 commercial fruits are pollinated by bats (including bananas and mangos).

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Bats in Iowa

• Bats, such as the big brown bat pictured below, eat 600 to 1,000 insects every hour.

• They eat some of the most aggressive agricultural pests and are indispensable to controlling insect populations (including mosquitos).

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Bats in Trouble

• Bats need our help.• Due to white-nose disease (a fungus that infects

and can kill a whole colony) and indiscriminate killing, bat numbers are in decline across the United States (4 are endangered).

• We do not want to Face a world without Bats.


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