Unit 9: Ecology

What is Ecology? The scientific study of interactions among organisms and between organisms and their environment

Question: Can anybody talk about what interactions are going on here Question: Can anybody talk about what interactions are going on here? (Between which organisms?)

Oh Deer! Population Lab Imagine that you are an individual in a population of deer living in a forest: What resources will you need to survive?

Discussion What happened to our deer population and resources throughout the game? Was there a limit in size for our deer population? Carrying Capacity: The largest population that can be supported by the limiting resource in a habitat I will have LoggerPro graphing tool to plot the data that is collected during the game, to show how the population changed

Intraspecific Competion Individuals of a species (deer) compete with others of the same species (deer) for access to the same resources What were our resources? Are there other resources that a species other than deer would need? Plants need sunlight!

Interspecific Competition Individuals of different species compete with each other for access to resources

Humans What does our population curve look like? What could have limited our population sizes up until about a thousand years ago