Ecological Relationships

How the WEB OF LIFE is maintained

Ecological Relationships

• As we saw in the Food Chains/Food Web slides, all living organisms within an environment are connected through a common link - food.

• Animals and plants that live together in the same area belong to a biological community .

Ecological Relationships

• All living organisms in a biological community depend on other living and nonliving things in some way. An example of this would be the way that some animals depend on plants for their food.

Ecological Relationships

• The science that studies these types of relationships is called ecology.

Ecological Relationships

• In Ecology we learn about the study of an organisms household. Organisms are part of a household - they don’t live by themselves.An organism is any living thing!

Ecological Relationships

• A community in which organisms live and interact with each other and their environment is called an ecosystem. Some examples are: oceans, plans, deserts, lakes, and streams.

Ecological Relationships

• Every organism in a community has

a niche, or a special job to do. There are three main jobs: producers, consumers, and decomposers.

Ecological Relationships

• Producers include most plants and their job is to provide food for all the other organisms in the community.

Connection: In a grocery store the produce section is where you find fruits and vegetables.

Producers are the first link

Ecological Relationships

• Consumers eat other organisms in the community. Their job is to feed on others. As they feed on each other, they link into the Food Chain.

ConsumersEat the producers

Ecological Relationships

• Decomposers get rid of the dead organisms in the community. These include fungi and bacteria.

DecomposersEat the producersAnd consumers

after they die

Ecological Relationships

• Each link in a food chain must be strong to ensure the survival of all the kinds of organisms. When one link is weakened, or broken, the rest of the food chain is affected.

Ecological Relationships

• A way that a community is weakened is by the effects of pollution, other animals which kill, and way that humans have interacted with nature for quite some time.

Ecological Relationships

• It is important to remember that each community has it’s producers, consumers, and decomposers, each with their own job to do.

• It is also important to remember that we humans cause a lot of trouble with the ecosystem when we are not careful with what we do.