How doEnvironmentalChanges Affect

Organisms?

By: Aiden & Camdino

By the end of our lesson, you will have learned that…

● Environmental changes can have good and bad effects on organisms.

● Human activities can affect the environment.● You will learn what a symbiotic relationship is.

Environment

● The environment provides you with food, air, water, and a safe place to live.

● All parts of the environment are connected and interact with each other.

● Natural, animal, and human caused events can change an environment.

● Environmental changes can have good and bad effects on organisms living there.

Yahoo!!!

Natural Environmental Changes

● Natural events such as forest fires,

blizzards, floods, mudslides, droughts,

tornados, and hurricanes can change the

environment quickly.

Natural Environmental Changes

● Events such as an ice age can change the environment

more slowly.

● Volcanic eruptions can cause changes quickly or over

long periods of time.

HELPMario!

Forest Fires Good or Bad?

● Clears the forest floor of debris

● Allows sunlight to reach the forest floor

● Kills disease and harmful insects

● Nourishes soil● Some trees require

heat to open and release their seeds

● Kills animals● Destroys their habitats● Kills healthy trees

Bad

Good

Animals Change Environments

● Changes made by animals can cause

damage to parts of the environment.

● Animals can cause changes to the environment.

● Changes made by animals can cause positive changes to other parts of the environment.

Humans Change Environments

● Human activities can harm an ecosystem.

● Open-pit mining and cutting down forests are examples

of human activities than can cause habitat destruction.

● Pollution can kill organisms and cause disease.

Conservation

● Not all changes caused by humans are harmful.

● Conservation is the act of protecting ecosystems and

organisms.

● Humans practice conservation by restoring habitats,

removing invasive plants and animals, and caring for

injured animals.

Living Things Change

● When their environment changes organisms may

change too.

● Living things change by moving or adapting.

● If they can’t change they may die and become

endangered or extinct.

Living Things Adapt

Some living things can adapt quickly such as deer eating tree bark instead of leaves after a forest fire.

Living things can adapt over time such as the Peppered Moth after pollution darkened the trees. Individuals of the same kind often differ in their characteristics and sometimes the differences give individuals an advantage in surviving and reproducing.

Survival!

● Some organisms do not survive changes in the environment.

● When a large amount of a species die, they may become endangered.

● Extinction happens when all of the members of a certain kind of living thing die.

Interdependence

● Earth has many

different environments-

and they are all

connected.

● The introduction or

removal of a species to

an environment can

upset the balance.

● Non-native or invasive

species like Kudzu, fire ants,

or the cane toad, can change

an environment in a bad way.

● They usually arrive in new

ecosystems because of

human actions.

● Invasive species can kill

native species by taking the

resources they need.

A Symbiotic relationship is...When an animal helps another animal by doing something and gets help in return from the other animal.

An example would be ....

+ =Remora Shark