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Principles of Ecology
Section 13.1: Ecologists Study Relationships (Part 1)
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Unit Objectives
• To be able to summarize the levels of organization that ecologists study.
• To be able to describe and apply research methods ecologists use to study the environment.
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Get Lab Notebooks
• I need you to get a lab notebook for class by next Monday (Sept. 9)
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Ecology- The Science of Life’s Interconnectedness
• Ecology – the study of the relationships among living things and their surroundings (including abiotic – non-living - things such as water, climate, minerals, and other non-living parts of an organism’s surroundings).
• Ecology comes from the Greek work Oikos, which means house.
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Ernst Haeckel
• A German zoologist and evolutionary biologist who coined the term ecology.
• Wanted to encourage biologists to study the ways organisms interact.
• Saw that nature was complexand its relationships needed to bestudied.
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Levels of Life
• Ecology gives order to the world and allows us to better understand it. We break it down into levels:
• Organism – an individual living thing.• Population – a group of the same species living in
one area (a population of tigers, frogs in a pond, or lady slipper orchids on a tallgrass prairie remnant.
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Levels of Life
• Community – A group of different species living together in one area.
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Ecosystem• Includes all organisms, as well as abiotic elements
(e.g. soil, climate, water, rocks, etc.) in an area.• Can be large or small.– The insides of a hollow tree or an ecosystem on a
much larger scale (e.g. oak/hickory and boreal forests, coral reefs, prairie potholes, etc.)
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Biome
• A major regional or global community of organisms. – Typically characterized by climatic conditions and
plant communities (tropical rain forests, tallgrass prairie, and tropical savannah).
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More Biomes
Mississippi River Delta Estuary
Montane rainforest, Colombian Andes
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Example: Salmon
• What role do Pacific salmon play in their ecosystems?
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Salmon and their ecosystem
• Over 140 species utilize the Pacific salmon for food.
• If not eaten, then their bodies decay and return essential nutrients to the rivers where they spawn.
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An ecosystem at risk . . .
• Due to profound changes to their environment, 214 species of Pacific salmon (and relatives like steelhead) are threatened with extinction – 106 are already extinct.– Population declines due to:
1. Dams (unable to reach spawning grounds).2. Polluted rivers from mining, logging and other
industries.3. The commercial salmon industry.
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Example: Bison
How are bison like Pacific salmon?
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Bison, the center of their ecosystem
The bison were (and hopefully will be again) the prairie’s keystone species. They were hunted
nearly to extinction.
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Example: Bats
• Bats are essential to ecosystems around the world.
• In the tropics, ecosystems would collapse without bats who pollinate plants and disperse seeds – allowing for forests and 1,000s of plant species to regenerate.
• 300 commercial fruits are pollinated by bats (including bananas and mangos).
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Bats in Iowa
• Bats, such as the big brown bat pictured below, eat 600 to 1,000 insects every hour.
• They eat some of the most aggressive agricultural pests and are indispensable to controlling insect populations (including mosquitos).
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Bats in Trouble
• Bats need our help.• Due to white-nose disease (a fungus that infects
and can kill a whole colony) and indiscriminate killing, bat numbers are in decline across the United States (4 are endangered).
• We do not want to Face a world without Bats.