CHAPTER 19 – END QUESTIONS

1. CHAPTER 19 – END QUESTIONS • You decide to visit Africa and find yourself on the savanna, what are some of the species in the community around you? in what ways might they be interacting with one another? • As you admire the community, you start to wonder about its diversity. What two components would you use to figure out if this community is more or less diverse than the one across the river? • You’re watching an action movie and someone gets it real good, leading your friend to say “well, he was obviously low on the food chain”. You of course immediately start thinking about food chains and food webs, how would you explain to your friend that there is no ‘food chain’? • You’re a kid and there are some tasty cookies for you and your sibling(s), what will determine whether or not you compete over them? • You look out your back window and see some interspecific interactions, some birds competing with each other – what are they most likely to be competing over and why? What else might they compete over? How does the competitive exclusion principle factor in? • You are watching a movie that pits aliens versus predators (you know the one), and your friend says that the aliens are terrible parasites, growing inside humans and then popping out, but you know that the aliens are not actually parasites at all – why? Also, are the ‘predators’ actually predators in an ecological sense? • In that action movie with aliens and ‘predators’ chasing humans, what might be some good passive defenses? What might be some active defenses? • You’re going through a forest and you see a plant crawling with ants. For some reason you decide to put your finger on one of the leaves and the ants immediately start swarming you – what kind of interaction is going on between these species and what do the ants get out of it? the plants?

2. HUMAN IMPACT – END QUESTIONS • You read on the internet that species are going extinct at the fastest rate in history, what is the #1 cause of this? What is the #2 cause? What can we do about it? • Your friend sees some smog over the city and worries that global warming is making the ozone hole worse. You of course appreciate the concern and so how would you explain to your friend that global warming and the ozone hole are completely unrelated? How does global warming work? What caused the ozone hole? What can we do about either or both of these problems? • You watch the Super Bowl on TV and they proudly claim that it is a carbon-neutral event, what does this mean? • You love gardening and you notice on the side of your bag of potting soil that it says “NPK” with the N being for Nitrogen. Plants cannot live without nitrogen but how can too much of this good thing become a bad thing for the environment and especially for lakes/ponds? • You visit the Amazon and notice a clearcut area, what are some ways that this destruction will affect the water cycle? • You are watching a nature show on TV and it recounts how the pesticide DDT nearly wiped out bald eagles, peregrine falcons and other majestic birds – how did this happen? • In a discussion on conservation, your friend says that species have always gone extinct, that extinction is a part of nature and so there’s nothing to be concerned about – what is missing in this argument?