WMAN 313 exam 1

Which term refers to a community of organisms plus the physical environment in which they live?

Ecosystem

Which statement about ecology is true?

Ecology involves the scientific study of interactions between organisms and their environment

&

Ecology involves the scientific study of interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms.

Which quality is a biotic feature of the environment?

The density of consumers

A group of individuals of a single species of swamp sparrows lives in the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts, and these individuals interact with one another. This is an example of a(n)

Population

Suppose you were examining whether a synthetic chemical reduced the growth rate of mice. Which measure would you take to ensure that the experiment was a controlled experiment?

Excluding one group of mice from exposure to the chemical, but otherwise treating all the mice in the same manner

Heat loss due to the exchange of kinetic energy by molecules in direct contact with one another is referred to as

Conduction

Greenhouse gases

-Water vapor (H2O)

-Carbon dioxide (CO2)

-Methane (CH4)

-Nitrous oxide (N2O)

What is measured by the lapse rate?

The decline in temperature as one moves up in altitude (temperature and height)

In which aquatic ecosystems are oxygen concentrations in the water usually highest?

Rapidly running rivers

Which statement best explains why atmospheric pressure declines with altitude?

Atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude, so the rising air expands and cools.

If climate change causes a boreal forest to be a little warmer and a little wetter, it will most likely become

Temperate deciduous forest.

As compared with terrestrial ecosystems, freshwater ecosystems

are more likely to be characterized by the animals they contain as well as the plants

Which feature is characteristic of a Mediterranean-type climate?

Regular fire disturbances

As one moves from the alpine to the subalpine to the montane zone of a mountain, the mean temperature

Consistently goes up

The coldest part of a large lake is usually in the _______ zone.

Benthic

The energy associated with dissolved solutes is called

Osmotic potential

Which statement best supports the speculation that large dinosaurs may have had some degree of endothermy?

Because their surface area-to-volume ratio probably would not have allowed for enough heat exchange with their environment, they would have needed to generate some internal energy.

The zone of turbulent air flow close to the surface of an object is referred to as a _______ layer.

Boundary

Compared with large endotherms, small endotherms require _______ feeding rates, partly because they have a _______ surface area-to-volume ratio.

Higher; higher

Which statement about adaptation is true?

Genetic variation within a population is a requirement for the evolution of adaptations.

Which statement about the r-K continuum is true?

It involves an ecological trade-off. (the r-K continuum features rapid growth and earlyreproduction versus slow growth and low reproduction; both clear tradeoffs)

Most species are intermediate between the two extremes.

Which organisms would be most likely to be K-selected?

Lions

According to Grime, under conditions of low stress and low disturbance _______ plants should predominate.

Competitive

A species of turtle grows for several years before becoming sexually mature. It mates, reproduces, and dies soon afterward. This species of turtle would best be described as

Semelparous

Endosperm in plants serves a function much like _______ in animals.

The egg yolk

In species where males provide the bulk of the parental care, males are most likely to

be choosy about which females they mate with

A lizard can get an average of about 20 calories from consuming a beetle. It takes the lizard 10 calories a minute to chase and catch beetles. What is the maximum amount of time that the lizard can spend catching each beetle and still survive?

2 minutes

Adaptive evolution is a process that occurs

Over multiple generations of individuals.

Females that are choosy about which males they mate with gain

Both direct and indirect benefits from their mate choice

Behavioral ecology is best described as the study of the

Ecological and evolutionary basis of animal behavior

In some trees and shrubs, competition among seedlings causes individuals to be spaced relatively evenly throughout the habitat. These plants exhibit a _______ type of dispersion pattern

Regular

Which statement about populations is false?

Most organisms have similar capacities for dispersal

Area-based methods often make use of sampling areas of a defined size called

Quadrats

A researcher who is interested in the number of individuals in a population of butterflies and their movement patterns would most likely use which method?

Mark-recapture

In the Seychelles warbler, territorial behavior encourages a _______ population dispersion pattern, and cooperative breeding encourages a _______ population dispersion pattern.

Regular; clumped

Which statement about life tables is false?

Survivorship (Ix) can increase from one age class to the next

A fictional animal, the tribble, reproduces in synchrony at regular intervals. When the logarithm of a particular tribble population was plotted against time, the result was a straight and increasing line. Which statement about the tribble population is true?

All of the above

Which population would be expected to remain stable in size?

A population with a lambda of 1; a population with an r of 0

Population regulation occurs when

Density-dependent factors affect birth, death, and emigration rates

Suppose that researchers are studying the life history of a population of gorillas, a species in which individuals can live for several decades. They can assess the ages of the gorillas with high accuracy, but because of funding constraints, they are limited to three years of study. Which table will the researchers be able to construct?

A static life table

At low population densities, the flocking behavior of some species of birds is disrupted to the extent that the population growth rate is lower at very low densities than it is at somewhat higher densities. This is an example of

An Allee effect

A population of turtles contained 342 individuals at the end of the year 2010. Since then, 44 have died, 37 were born, 17 immigrated, and 6 emigrated. What is the population size now?

346

Which of the following is a violation of Levins's theoretical conception of a metapopulation that is often seen in a real metapopulation?

Isolation by distance

Which of the following is most likely to lead to population cycles?

Delayed density dependence

Which statement about environmental stochasticity is true?

Environmental stochasticity places grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park at risk for extinction despite the average positive growth rate of this population.

Suppose that rabbits are the only prey and food supply of foxes, and that the predator‒prey interaction follows Lotka‒Volterra dynamics. The mortality rate of foxes in the absence of rabbits is 0.1 per week, and the intrinsic growth rate of rabbits in the absence of predation is 0.2 per week. The capture efficiency is 0.002, and the efficiency at which rabbit biomass is converted into fox biomass is 0.2.

If there are initially 30 foxes and 400 rabbits, the net growth rate in the fox population will be a _______ of _______ per week.

gain; 56

Moths resting on the trunks of trees often resemble the tree bark so that potential predators do not perceive them as prey. This is an example of

Crypsis

Herbivores most commonly eat the _______ of plants

Leaves

Which statement best describes the relationship between snow geese and plants in the salt marshes that border the Hudson Bay?

At low densities, the geese benefit the plants; at high densities, the geese harm the plants

All predatory relationships have the potential to reduce the _______ of prey or host organisms.

survival and growth and reproduction