Honors Biology - Chapter 27: Community Ecology Practice Quiz

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering fundamental community ecology concepts, including interspecific interactions, symbiotic relationships, ecological succession, and niche differentiation from Honors Biology Chapter 27.

Community

The level of ecological organization formed when groups of different species that interact with each other in a given area are considered together.

Predator Removal Effect

A phenomenon where insecticide application results in greater crop damage because the chemical eliminates natural predators that previously kept the plant-eating insect population in check, allowing pest numbers to explode.

Competitive Exclusion Principle

The ecological principle stating that no two species can occupy the exact same ecological niche in the same place at the same time.

Resource Partitioning

The dividing or splitting of shared, limited resources and ecological niches (such as food types, feeding areas, or root depths) that allows competing species to coexist.

Habitat

The specific physical home or location where an organism lives within an ecosystem.

Warning Coloration

Conspicuous, bright visual markings on an organism—such as those on a poisonous frog—that advertise toxicity or danger to predators, functionally analogous to auditory signals like rattlesnake rattles.

Commensalism

A symbiotic relationship between different species over an extended period where one individual benefits while the other individual neither benefits nor is harmed.

Mutualism

An interspecific interaction in which both participating species benefit from the relationship, such as honeyguides leading ratels to bee nests to share the contents, or corals exchanging nutrients with tissue-dwelling algae.

Parasitism

A relationship where one organism benefits by living on or inside a host organism over an extended period, harming the host in the process without usually killing it immediately.

Keystone Species

A species that exerts a disproportionately large influence on community structure and biodiversity relative to its abundance, such as beavers altering landscapes to create wetlands or Pisaster starfish preying on dominant mussels to maintain space diversity.

Climax Community

A relatively stable, late-stage community that tends to persist in an area over time because its constituent species do not significantly alter their environment.

Succession

The structural change in a community and its abiotic environment over time, characterized by a predictable sequence of plant and animal assemblages replacing one another.

Primary Succession

Ecological succession that initiates on newly exposed or bare substrate devoid of life, such as newly exposed rock scoured by retreating glaciers or wave-overturned boulders colonized first by pioneer algae like Ulva.

Coral Bleaching

The process by which corals expel their photosynthetic endosymbiotic algae and turn white when subjected to environmental stressors such as elevated water temperatures or pollution.

Interspecific Competition

Competition occurring between individuals of different species for shared, limited environmental resources, such as food or spatial territory.

Aggressive Mimicry

A deceptive evolutionary adaptation where a predator or parasite mimics the appearance and behavior of a harmless or beneficial organism to lure prey or hosts, exemplified by the saber-tooth blenny mimicking the cleaner wrasse to bite flesh from visiting fish.