Kaleab Mebratu Biology Homework

Question 1

Draw a diagram of the carbon cycle.

Question 2
Kaleab Mebratu Biology Homework

Describe how energy enters moves through and exists?

The food chain starts with solar energy from the sun and producers have evolved to pick up the light
energy using their chlorophyll and use it for all their activities and this energy is provided by the
sunlight after absorbing the sunlight autotrophs convert it into chemical energy so that it can be
used by living organisms by the process of photosynthesis. But not everything will be utilized and
only 1 % is trapped by the producers and the rest is lost to the surroundings and some are reflected
back. From the 1 % trapped, only 10 % is effectively used and the energy loss is mostly due to
respiration and heat loss and also the energy is lost to egestion, excretion. When living organisms die
their body is decayed by saprotrophs for energy and this ensures that the food cycle continues. As
the tropic levels increase the biomass in turn decreases because not so much energy is left for more
tropic levels to exist and this eventually limits the length of food chains.

Question 3

a) i) Species richness decreases when isolation increases

Ii) The effect lake age has on species richness is neutral meaning no effect
iii) There will be a higher number of possible species because a large lake can accommodate
a lot of place for species to dwell

b) i) The species richness in both high and low disturbance lakes has increased as the the area
increases and high disturbance lakes usually possess lower species richness

ii) The hypothesis stated above is partially true because higher lakes are with the highest
richness and they occur with low disturbance levels. And also smaller lakes have highest
richness at intermediate disturbance.

iii) The first possibility is primary consumer waterfowl may compete for food with larger fish
populations and in the end their population might decrease in this particular areas and also
the aquaculture increases particular type of fish populations and this in turn will cater a
larger food source for secondary consumer waterfowl and subsequently their population will
grow.

c) i) The post-subsidence richness is lower than the post-remediation macro invertebrate taxa
richness as seen in the bar graph the standard error for the post subsidence richness is lower
than the post-remediation richness.

ii) Macro invertebrates would gain their habitat from larger substrate diameter and as a
result their population number would likely grow. In order to increase their population
number they need food for fish populations

iii) Species richness is increased largely by remediation as compared to post-subsidence. The

Standard error of richness level and pre-mining level indicate that these two measurements
are similar. The pre-mining level is too high and the remediation does not increase the
number of fish as much as the pre-mining but it increases the fish number and also after one
year it increases the number of species.