Ecosystems, Habitats, and Survival Needs Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering ecosystems, abiotic and biotic factors, essential survival needs, adaptations, natural selection, symbiosis, ecosystem engineers, and ecosystem case analysis frameworks.

Ecology

The study of how organisms interact with each other and their environment.

Environment

An organism's surroundings, including all of the living and nonliving things that exist within it across various scales such as a classroom, a school, or a city like Fort McMurray.

Ecosystem

The system of interactions between living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) things within a particular environment that is self-supporting.

Self-supporting

The essential property of an ecosystem that allows it to maintain its processes and keep going on its own.

Abiotic Factors

Nonliving components of an ecosystem that affect organisms, including energy, water, minerals, climate conditions (temperature and light), and substrate quality (soil pH).

Biotic Factors

Living elements that shape an environment or affect another organism, such as predation, food availability, competition, and disease.

Habitat

The physical area where an organism lives that supplies its essential survival requirements, including food, shelter, protection, and space.

Essential Needs

The mandatory conditions required for any organism to survive: food (nutrients/energy source), water (moisture), sunlight or heat, space, and air or gases.

Adaptation

A physical feature or behavior an organism has evolved that improves its ability to compete for resources, survive, and reproduce in its environment.

Physical Adaptation

An inherited structural trait—such as specialized beaks, claws, fur, scales, camouflage, or body shape—that enables an organism to thrive in its habitat.

Behavioral Adaptation

The actions or behavioral patterns an animal exhibits to increase its survival, classified into inherited (instinctual) and learned behaviors.

Learned Behavior

A behavioral adaptation acquired through parental instruction or individual experience over time, such as knowing how to find food safely or avoiding danger.

Instinctual Behavior

An inherited behavioral adaptation passed down genetically through generations that an animal performs automatically, such as migration or hibernation.

Evolution

The gradual change in the inherited traits of a population over many generations as advantageous characteristics become more common.

Natural Selection

The evolutionary mechanism where organisms possessing traits best suited to their environment survive and reproduce more successfully than others.

Artificial Selection

The intentional process where humans select and breed specific animals or plants to pass on desired traits.

Peppered Moth Evolution

An observed case of natural selection in England where industrial soot darkened tree bark, causing dark moths to increase from about $1\%$ to $98\%$ of the population by the year $1895$.

Symbiosis

A close, long-term biological interaction between two different species living together in an ecosystem.

Mutualism

A symbiotic relationship in which both participating species benefit from their interaction.

Commensalism

A symbiotic relationship in which one species benefits while the other species is neither helped nor harmed.

Parasitism

A symbiotic relationship where one organism (the parasite) benefits by deriving nutrients at the expense of harming another organism (the host).

Ecosystem Engineer

An organism, such as a beaver building dams, that physically modifies, creates, or destroys habitats, altering resource availability for other species.

CER Framework

A scientific writing structure comprising a Claim, Evidence directly cited from observation, scientific Reasoning, and potential Limitations.

Earthworm Moisture Dependency

Earthworms require moist soil to keep their skin moist, which is necessary to perform gas exchange and avoid dehydration.

Cellular Respiration in Aquatic Life

The physiological process by which fish absorb dissolved oxygen from water to release energy from food for essential life processes.

Habitat Fragmentation

The division of an animal's habitat by human developments like highways, which blocks movement between seasonal areas required for feeding and raising young.