Lecture 1 Chapters 1,2, and 22 Flashcards
What is Ecology?
The relationship between organisms and their environment and among individual organisms and species of organisms.
What is Variability
He showed graph of percent of ice coverage in the Atlantic ocean. Y axis is amount of ice coverage, on X axis is years. Grey stuff in background is a mess but they are individual data points taken from different parts of the Atlantic ocean. His point is there is nothing wrong with the data, that is just the way data in ecology is, has very high variability. reason for that is because the ice level is probably influence by a lot of things, temperature, cloud cover, precipitation. The data arent sloppy they are variable and easily interpretable with appropriate use of statistical analysis as shown by the solid red, green, blue and black lines, which show different ways of taking averages. Black line shows average, and clear pattern shown that there is a decline. Red line shows downward trend as well. green n blue is linear trend. wants to show us ecological data is very variable, and messy, not because of incompetant scientists or instruments, this is the real data and they are very sophisticated and accurate.
What’s biodiversity?
Number of species basically. a lot of biodiversity near equator in the tropics, in warm areas. Endemism: species only conc in one area.
Value of biodiversity arises from…
Social, economic, and ecological considerations
Provisioning Services
any type of benefit to people that can be extracted from nature. Along with food, other types of provisioning services include drinking water, timber, wood fuel, natural gas, oils, plants that can be made into clothes and other materials, and medicinal benefits.
Economic Services example
Tourism to see biodiversity
Whats the rate of extinction and what kind of process is it
Extinction is going at a much much faster rate, rate is unprecedented. Extinction is a natural process and has to do with habitat destruction.
Describe a mass extinction event
AN event in which at least 75% of existing species go extinct
One of the most famous extinctions happened when..
An asteroid hit somewhere near mexican peninsula, and caused extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 40000 miles per hour, size of Manhattan asteroid.
several mass extinctions
one cuz of volcanos, one cuz of asteroids and theres more due to our destructive abilities
what is threatened mean
Not extinct, but pretty close to it. Amphibians have a lot of threatened species because they are particalury suseptible to pollution (ex road salt). birds have lowest extinction rates
Why should we care about species diversity
species richness has an effect on ecosystem function, (biomass is ecosystem function). High species richness, the more biomass.
Genetic Diversity of animals / plants
they breed the most sellable animals for economic reasons, so there is less diversity of animals. There is also less diversity in plants cuz farmers wanna grow what sells the most (ex corn)
Genetic Diversity of animals / plants
they breed the most sellable animals for economic reasons, so there is less diversity of animals. There is also less diversity in plants cuz farmers wanna grow what sells the most (ex corn)
Genetic Diversity of animals / plants
they breed the most sellable animals for economic reasons, so there is less diversity of animals. There is also less diversity in plants cuz farmers wanna grow what sells the most (ex corn they want bigger knobs)
what are they doing right now to preserve plant diversity
global seed vault in svalbard. they collect all these seeds in foil packets and store them in a control room, so if any species were to go extinct we will still have its seed
Are human activities beneficial to biodiversity
No a lot of human activity reduces biodiversity, we participate in deforestation and other destructive activities
Whats going on with forest cover in North America
In north America, we have some tree loss as well as tree gain
Amazon rain forest and south africa tree cover
lots of loss of biodiversity due to cutting down forest to make space for agriculture.
Whats going on with fisheries
they have been over fished. collapsed fishery: when a fishery no longer has a population that can be fished
Cod disappeared because of
Over fishing, companies took a lot of cod and canned it, so not a lot of cod left. they are not extinct, but the decline is present
Are introduced species increasing or decreasing
they increased, we see more population of certain species on staten island. they are unintentional introductions, they some how get caught on a ship and brought here
What is biotic homogenization
imagine all countries sharing their species with each other. ex, american bird goes to asia, asian cow goes to africa etc. Bio homogenization will occur and its the process in which unique species compositions originally found in different regions slowly become more similar due to movement of people, cargo and species
What is biomagnification?
The process in which the concentration of a contaminant increases as it moves up the food chain. example, dolphins eating fish that contain mercury thus increasing overall mercury content in dolphin meat. DDT is another example, DDT in water, absorbed by plankton fish eat, other fish eat, then birds it. DDT is toxic to not only mosquitos, but its toxic to other organisms. DDT binds to fats and accumulates in their fatty tissues, then another species eats it leading to biomagnification.DDT in high conc is a neurotoxin
