Chapter 24 Part 1

Question 1

What is microbial ecology?

Answer 1

The study of microbes in their natural habitats

Question 2

What is bioremediation?

Answer 2

The use of microbes to breakdown harmful chemicals

Question 3

What is ecology?

Answer 3

The study of living things and their interaction with the non-living environment

Question 4

What is the difference between biotic and abiotic factors?

Answer 4

Biotic refers to living things or their dead remains and abiotic factors refer to non-living factors such as gases, minerals, water, temperatures and light

Question 5

What is the broadest level of organization on earth?

Answer 5

Biosphere

Question 6

What are the terms for the physical locations on earth?
Water________
Soil_________
Air________

Answer 6

Hydrosphere
Lithosphere
Atmosphere

Question 7

Terrestrial biomes are characterized by what 3 factors?

Answer 7

1) dominant plant species
2) temperature
3) precipitation

Question 8

What are communities and populations?

Answer 8

Communities: groups of many species living in the same habitat

Populations: groups of the same species

Question 9

What is an organism’s habitat and niche?

Answer 9

Habitat: the physical location of the environment to which an organism has adapted

Niche: the overall role that an organism serves in the community

Question 10

How might the micro environment vary from the macro environment?

Answer 10

A microenvirontment determines the habits of microbes and is defined by the environmental conditions in the immediate area around microbes. Macroenvironments are much larger ecosystems

Question 11

What is satellitism?

Answer 11

A condition in which one species provides nutritional or protective factors needed by another species

Question 12

Why do most species of microbes depend on a community of microbes for survival?

Answer 12

One species on its own is not capable of producing all the organic and inorganic factors required for its own growth and metabolism

Question 13

What is unique about the species Desukforudis audaxviator?

Answer 13

It is able to metabolize using inorganic nutrients that it leaches from rocks

Question 14

What does an energy pyramid represent?

Answer 14

The energy and nutritional relationships between organisms

Question 15

What does the relative size of the blocks at each trophic level indicate?

Answer 15

The # of individual organisms

Question 16

What do the arrows indicate in an energy pyramid?

Answer 16

The direction, or flow, of energy

Question 17

Why are primary producers essential to all ecosystems?

Answer 17

They are the only organisms in and ecosystem that can produce organic carbon compounds by assimilating inorganic compounds from the atmosphere. Without them the would be no energy for other organisms in the ecosystem.

Question 18

Which type of producer makes up the vast majority on earth?

Answer 18

Photosynthesizers

Question 19

What is the relationship between quaternary, tertiary, secondary, and primary consumers, to one another?

Answer 19

Secondary tertiary, and quaternary consumers feed on other consumers below them in the pyramid. Indirectly, they are feeding off the primary consumers whom initially created the energy

Question 20

Which of the consumers have the largest population size in their given ecosystem?

Answer 20

Primary consumers

Question 21

What do decomposers feed on?

Answer 21

Dead organic matter from plants, animals, and other microbes

Question 22

Why are decomposers important to their ecosystems?

Answer 22

They revert organic matter back into inorganic matter

Question 23

Why are there always fewer organisms at the top of the food pyramid, compared to the base?

Answer 23

Energy gets lost or used as it moves up the pyramid so there is always fewer organisms high on the food pyramid than there is in the bottom of the pyramid.

Question 24

What is the purpose of a food web and how are they different from food pyramids?

Answer 24

They more accurately describe the dynamic interactions among producer, consumers, and decomposers in specific ecosystems