Section 5: Aquatic Ecosystems Flashcards
What abiotic factors are all aquatic ecosystems affected by?
Sunlight, temperature, oxygen, and salt content.
What are two types of aquatic ecosystems?
Freshwater ecosystems and marine ecosystems.
What are the types of bodies of water in freshwater ecosystems?
Streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes.
What have animals done to adapt to the fast-water streams?
They have hooks, streamlined bodies, suckers, etc.
How is a river formed?
When streams flow together.
What is a river like?
It is slower, warmer, and contains less oxygen than a stream.
What are ponds and lakes?
They are bodies of standing water.
Fill in the blank:
Lakes are usually _____ and _____ than ponds.
Larger and deeper
What is an estuary?
Where fresh water of a river meets the salt water of an ocean.
What is the intertidal zone?
Between the highest high-tide line and the lowest low-tide line.
What is the neritic zone?
The region of shallow water over the continental shelf.
What kind of organisms grow in the neritic zone?
Many schools of fish, sardines, lots of algae, and in warm water there are coral reefs. Life is abundant here.
What are the two zones within the open-ocean zone?
The surface zone and the deep zone.
What is the surface zone?
The region in the open ocean zone where light is able to pass through. Algae carry out photosynthesis in this part.
What is the deep zone like?
It is almost totally dark. The animals that live there feed on the remains of dead animals that sink down from the surface zone. Many bizarre creature live here.
