Case Studies Flashcards
Name 3 adaptations of army ants
- Temporary nests are formed by ants themselves with interlocking jaws and claws
- highly developed sense of time
- Carry out raid 123 degrees counter clockwise from previous raid
- follow a pheromone trail
How do birds deal with the cold?
- Increased feather bulk
- puffing up feathers and trapping air
- tucking in head and leg under feathers
- arteries and veins lie in close proximity to each other
- decreasing circulation by shutting down small blood vessels
- use dense cover of conifers for roosting sites
- shivering
- bury in the snow
What happened in Kaibab Plateau?
- set aside as game preserve, especially for mule deer
- predator removal program (mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, all wolves killed)
- Deer population boomed, overshot carrying capacity, and came back down
- shows importance of predators in maintaining balance within carrying capacity
What did Dr. John Snow discover?
- the source of a cholera epidemic
- determined it was a disease carrying germs
Why did the Mayan population crash?
- population growth exceeded available resources
- deforestation and hillside erosion due to increased need of farmland
- increased fighting over limited resources
- greedy kings and nobles
Name 5 hummingbird adaptations
- can fly forward, backward, or hover
- can rotate wings through an angle of 180 degrees
- can flap wings extremely fast, and have extremely fast heartbeats
- extremely high rates of metabolism
- extremely territorial
Name 2 adaptations of leaf cutter ants
- follow pheromone trail
- mutualistic relationship with fungus
Describe the relationship between leaf cutter ants and fungus
mutualistic. Ants help fungus by chewing up leaves and placing the fungus on top. From there they cultivate and “farm” the fungus, weeding out unwanted fungus. Fungus provide the ants with food source while fungus cannot survive without the intervention of the ants in cultivation.
Why has the Kokanee fish population declined significantly?
- Failure to understand community structure.
- Mysid shrimp was introduced to serve as a steady food source, but instead ended up competing with fingerlings for zooplankton.
- Due to migration patterns of mysid shrimp and Kokanee fish, the opportunity for the fish to feed on the shrimp was only a short period of time, making them not as good of a food source as anticipated.
What are the first species to colonize following a lava flow? (craters of the moon)
Lichen
