What Limits Your Species? Unit 1: Seventh Grade http://glencoe.mcgraw- hill.com/sites/dl/free/0078778085/160350/0005 0757.html

Carrying Capacity As you know, carrying capacity refers to the size of the population that can live in an environment without doing the environment any harm

Carrying Capacity If the carrying capacity of the environment is exceeded, organisms die and the environment may be permanently destroyed. This applies to plants, animals and people

Look at the square…. How many M&Ms do you think that square will hold? Write your estimate under the box. Now, place as many M&Ms as you can comfortably fit into the square and count them. Record this number next to your estimate. The second number is the carrying capacity of the square for M&Ms .

What would happen if… You added one more M&M? Two more? Three? Four? What if you used Hershey’s Kisses instead? Would the carrying capacity change? What are some of the results of exceeding the carrying capacity in real-life?

Limiting Factors Limiting factors are very closely tied to carrying capacity. Many kinds of animals can increase in numbers very quickly, and may temporarily exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat.

Limiting Factors This results in stress, starvation, disease, predation, parasites, poor reproductive success and damage to the habitat.

Limiting Factors For example: Multiplying river otters can quickly eat all the fish in a stream. With the fish gone, food becomes a limiting factor. The river otters may starve or move to another area.

Limiting Factors The stream now has a reduced carrying capacity for river otters until the fish population grows back again