Chapter 7 - Energy and Nutrient Relations

Vocabulary flashcards covering feeding strategies, functional responses, optimal foraging theory, and environmental applications from Chapter 7.

Autotroph

An organism that is self-feeding and capable of making or fixing its own food energy.

Heterotroph

An organism unable to make its own food that obtains energy and carbon from organic compounds derived from other sources.

Photo-autotroph

An organism that synthesizes food using sunlight as its energy source and carbon dioxide as its carbon source through photosynthesis.

Chemo-autotroph

A rare organism that synthesizes organic food from inorganic compounds (such as sulfur, nitrate, iron, CO, or $H_2S$) and carbon dioxide through chemosynthesis.

Functional response

The change in an individual organism's feeding rate in response to changes in food abundance.

Numerical response

A population-level response describing changes in population density relative to food abundance.

Functional Response Curves

Graphical models (Types I, II, and III) showing how rate of consumption changes with prey abundance, eventually leveling off at a maximum feeding rate.

Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT)

A theory based on the Principle of Allocation predicting that organisms are selected by evolutionary pressures to maximize their rate of energy intake when choosing prey.

Prey Selection Factors

The key variables determining prey selection in Optimal Foraging Theory: availability, quality, foraging effort (hunting time), processing time, and defense.

Bluegill Prey Selection Study

A study by Werner and Mittelbach (1981) demonstrating that bluegills selectively feed on $4\text{ mm}$ prey to maximize energy intake rate, even though $1\text{ mm}$ prey are most abundant in the environment.

Bioremediation

The practical application of using bacteria to clean up or solve environmental problems.