Chapter 49: Intro to ecology:

Ecology is the study of how different organisms interact with the environment. The abundance distribution of
organisms
- 5 different levels of ecology
1. Organism:
● explore morphological, physiological, and
behavioral adaptations in a particular area
● How individuals interact with physical
surroundings (other organisms in same
proximity)
2. Population:
● How the number of individuals population
change over time
3. Community:
● How nature interacts with other species (eg.
Predation, parasitism, competition)
4. Ecosystems:
● How nutrients & energy move among organisms
5. Global:
● The biosphere surrounding the earth
● How humans impact the biosphere
Factors that influence climate
● The Equator faces the sun (between march-September)
● Tropic gets the most sun
● Earths tilted 23.5 allowing for seasons
Climate: long term weather condition in a specific area
equator: receives the maximum amount of sun radiation
Hadley cell: heated air due to sunlight along the equator (expanding and rises) holding moisture in the air
Tropics are wet: cooler air is unable to hold moisture in the air therefore condensation occurs (precipitation occurs)
meaning that tropics will be moist
Coriolis effect: Air within the cell goes astray from the normal path (cause for different wind pattern/ocean current)
In different latitudes
● As more air is heated, cooler air makes its way to the poles
Mountains: effect local climate
- Moist air blows onto the mountain and cools and loses moisture
- Rain falls due to this
- Older air pushed towards the mountainside
Biomes: regions with abiotic characteristics and vegetation types (Sahara dessert)
- Temperature and moisture influence the net primary productivity of energy that is stored by plants
Biomass: Total mass of an organism
- Climate crisis does affect biomes on longterm based observation and experiments
Fall turnover: when surface water cools temperature reaches partial equilibrium
- Lake melts: spring water from fall turnover carrying sediments is rapidly photosynthetic organisms
- Turnover didn’t place freshwater, nutrients remain in the bottom of the water humans productivity
- Humans cause direct change to the properties of the environment and water
Oceanic zone - The deep water
Benthic zone - bottom of the ocean (water biomes are differentiated by water depth and water velocity)
Photic zone - the sunlight zone Aphotic zone - non-sunlight zone
● NPP is the indicator of above-ground plant biomass
Chapter 50: Behavioural Ecology

● Behavior: response to a stimulus

● Behavioral Ecology: Behavioural adaptations that have evolved in response
to ecological selection pressures
● Proximate cause: explains how actions occurred, (Eg. hormonal signal
trigger)
- Ultimate cause: explains cause on evolutionary consequences.
- Behavior: is a phenotype evolved by natural selection
- Animals think like humans - max benefit, mini costs.
● Animals have non-perfect fitness, tradeoff genetic, and the constant
change in environment.
- Bumblebees fight among flowers
● To minimize overall distance traveled
Three treatments were set
1. No extra predation risk/seed in the treatment
2. Increased predation risk - trained owls fly over the treatment subplots 3x/h
3. Increased predation risk + increased seed
● Sexual selection:
○ Animals compete for the chance to mate with the same
species
● Introsexual selection:
○ Males compete with others for mates
- Rhino beetle fights males to claim their females.
Expediating energy increased injury but increasing high
fitness
- Animals need to communicate with one another (how they
behave)
● Proximate Causes:
1. Pioting - familiar landmarks help guide
2. Compass orientation - certain orientation movement
3. True navigation - locating a place using the surface of Earth
4. Compass orientation - use the sun to help guide
Honey bee’s communication is a proximate cause.
● They communicate by:
○ Dancing when returning to the hive and returning to the food source with unmarked bees.
○ Dance reveals: direction of the food source from hive using sun
● Animals do play dead helps them in natural selection.
● Venus flytrap will act like it’s opened but once the bug enters it will quickly close
Why does deceit not work all the time?
● Natural selection: favors individuals that detect liars. If mimics are higher there is less reproductive
success.
● Altruism behavior: fitness cost to the individual of mimics.
● Exhibiting the behavior and a fitness benefit to recipient behavior.
● Breastfeeding is innate behavior
- not learned and immediately performed after birth forms of learned behavior.
● Honey bees communicate with one another by performing a sequence of movements in the hive
- (waggle dance).
● Prairie dogs giving an alarm (kin selection)
Chapter 51: Population Ecology

- Study of how the number of individuals in a populations change over time

- A tradeoff between survivorship due to limited availability of
resources
- All organisms have a limited quantity of resource
● how they use the resources in order to maximize their
fitness.
● Organisms adapt to the resources available to them
(natural selection)
● all adaptations will have a cost they are a tradeoff.
- If organisms prioritize survival over other aspects then fewer
offspring would occur
- If more organisms prioritize more offspring it would limit the number of available resources
Logistic Growth VS Exponential Growth
● Logistic growth is when the growth rate decreases as population size approach a maximum
- made by limited resources
● The exponential growth rate is when the growth rate stays the same regardless of the population size.
- limited by resource availability.
● Population dynamics - changes in populations through time
● Density-dependent - factors for the declining growth rate in logistic growth
- predation competition can decrease survivorship and fecundity
- Density-dependent factors that limit population size
Competition for food Disease/Parasitism Predation
- Food - Infection - Prey density increased=predation
- Water - Parasitism - ex. More population, more Lync predation
- Light - Stress
- Nutrients - Toxic Waste (Uric Acid)
- Oxygen - Ammonic
- CO2
Population Density: The number of individuals
varies through organism life
● Sedimentary species are counted as
transects
● Emigration occurs when individuals
leave a population to join another
population eg. California → Mexico
● Change in population growth is:
○ Births - Deaths + immigration - Emigrants
‘

Chapter 52: Community Ecology

What is community ecology?
- Study of interactions among populations in a common
community
- Exchanging foo, resources, living side by side
- The four different interactions are:
1) Commensalism: One species that benefits from other
species
- Barely affects fitness
2) Competition: individuals with the same resources but low
fitness
- Intra and inter members
- Symmetric competition is each species experience
qual decrease in fitness while competing for ith
each other
3) Consumption: one organism eats from another organism
4) Mutualism: two species interact and benefit each other
● Interspecific competition: occurs when niches of the two species overlap (# of niches overlap results)
The difference between habitat and niche/importance of niche concept habitat:
● All aspect of where an organism lives (including abiotic and biotic factors) without and alterations
● Niche: constricted space including everything needed for organisms to reproduce and survive
● Selected parameters: behavior of organism and the food source
● Organisms with the same niche can live together because competition
- Competition competes for survival and one will win whilst one will lose
- Mutualism interaction is when both survive
Distinguish between top-down and bottom-up influences affecting
community structure top-down influences
● Remove top predators allows dramatic change
● Keystone species: have a greater impact on the distribution of
the surroundings
- eg. yellow stone ecosystem started to decline when
wolves disappeared
● Bottom-up influences: decreased to increased trophic levels
- Abiotic factors considered bottom-up control whilst
bottom species of the food web effect majorly on the community
Ecosystem engineers: provide physical structure to habitat for species
Chapter 53: ecosystem and global energy
How energy flows from producers then to consumers than to decomposers
● Decomposers food chain made up from eating the dead remains of animals (one trophic level to the next)
Process of biomagnification:
● When predatory animals consume their prey they consume their toxic chemicals within prey
- Zooplankton are infected with mercury and consumed by small fish the big fish eat the small fish
then keeps going up the food chain increasing concentration of mercury going up the chain
increasing the consequences of top and trophic levels
Factors that limit productivity in aquatic/terrestrial
● NPP is up than when in oceans the more light available to drive
photosynthesis on land
● Depth of light penetration affects primary production of the photic
zone
Nutrient addition by humans causing pollutants
● Burning oils and gasoline (c02 emissions)
● Animal manure and sewage treatment
How burning fossils has led to rapid global warming
● Burning the fuels release nitric oxide
● Adding excess nitrogen depleting the ozone
● Can lead to oxygen-free zones
Several ways that climate change affects
organisms
● Evolving response to climate
change
● Tawny owl frequency has
increased since climate warmed up and
snow melted and their predator decreased resulting in decreased predation
The major reservoir of various nutrient cycles
● Phosphorous in earth crust is a major reservoir mobilized by
weathering of work mining
● Active reservoir
1950 there has been a high amount of release of co2 in the atmosphere
(industrial revolution)
- Greenhouse gas traps heat in the earth increasing temperature
- Nitrogen methane release increase greenhouse gasses
Negative feedback:
- Changes due to global warming meaning increase intake of c02 and
greenhouse gasses up negative feedback
- Should reduce global warming
- Growth rates of tree species increase since atmospheric co2
- Positive feedback occurs when changes due to fastened warming like
melting of glaciers
- Warmer climate increase more co2
Chapter 54: Biodiversity/Conservation Biology
● Progress in studying, preserving biodiversity
● Biodiversity:
○ visual tree of life: evolutionary relationships of all forms of life
○ Extinction: Tips and branches are removed
● There are three levels of biodiversity: Genetic Diversity, Species Diversity, and Ecosystem Diversity
1. Genetic Diversity
a. Total genetic information within a population
- A number of relative frequencies of all genes
and alleles in species.
- Environmental sequencing: sample of
soil/water to document the diversity
2. Species Diversity
a. Number of different species in a given community.
- Species richness: The number of species
present diversity
- In both the number of species and the
evenness of species abundance.
3. DNA Barcoding
a. all items are barcoded, animals have unique barcodes
to be able to identify them
Ecosystem Diversity
● different ecosystems in an area.
● Biotic and Abiotic factors describe biology at a large level.
● species are vanishing faster than ever.
- The many biological threats are overexploitation, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution,
deforestation.
● habitats are destroyed for the species present (biodiversity is reduced)
● Overexploitation is removal of marine life.
- Removal of big predators impacts animals at a lower trophic level.
● Invasive species: native species that change the local biotic and abiotic resources in a given land.
- Introduce any disease in native species.
● Pollution caused by humans affects the abiotic and biotic environment.
- Industrial pollution like lead/mercury goes into water streams and kills fish
- Persistent organic pollutants have a direct effect.
Climate Change
● Ice caps and glaciers are melting at a fast rate
● habitats are destroyed
● Rising sea levels and since the increase of CO
● carbonic acid in oceans affecting corals
● Humans depend on freshwater supply & clean air and the
food to eat.
- All this makes our medicines and building
material.
Preservation and restoration strategies
● Wildlife corridor - undeveloped habitat connected to protected areas
- encourages gene flow
● To protect wildlife, humans should stop exploitation and degradation
- Plus stopping invasive species from entering new habitats
- reduce climate change to avoiding all the threats that cause a negative impact on biodiversity