Tag: Ecology

Ecosystem – Science Class

Hello everyone, welcome back to my first blog post of Term 3. I’m keen to share what we’ve been exploring in science lately. This week, we learnt into the world of ecosystems! It was such an enlightening experience to learn about this subject, and I discovered so many things I never knew before. Stay tuned to know what I learnt.

 

What are we going to do? – 

Achievement Objective

Living World: Ecology – “Explore and describe the interconnection and interdependence of living things in an ecosystem.

 

Learning Objective

Students will understand the concept of ecosystems and identify the components that make up an ecosystem, including both biotic and abiotic factors.

What does Eco-system stand for? –

1. Eco – Living Things

2. System –  A collection of different activities working together

 

Ecosystems –

The physical environment is the surroundings of an organism, and it includes the atmosphere, land and water.

An organism may depend on its environment for nutrients, light, warmth, shelter and space.

 

Biotic factors affect Niches

Biotic factors that affect populations within an ecosystem are caused by the relationship between the living things in that ecosystem, for example:

  1. Competition
  2. Predation
  3. Parasites
  4. Food availability
  5. Disease

Meanings:

  1. A situation in which someone is trying to win something or be more successful than someone else.
  2. The fact that an animal hunts, kills, and eats other animals.
  3. An animal or plant that lives in another animal or plant of a different type and feeds from it.
  4. The physical presence of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality.
  5. An illness of people, animals, plants, etc., caused by infection or a failure of health rather than by an accident.

 

Habitat

The habitat of a species is the place where members of the species live and reproduce.

The habitat of the Australasian Gannet:

  • Coastal areas of New Zealand and Australia.
  • The breeding habitat is mostly on small offshore islands.
  • All juvenile New Zealand birds migrate to Australia.

 

Feeding roles

As we looked at before, there are different feeding roles within the ecosystem.

  • Producers – plants
  • Consumers
    • Carnivores eat meat only
    • Omnivores eat both meat and plants
    • Herbivores eat plants only
  • Decomposer – insects, bacteria, fungi

Community Relationships

A community consists of all the organisms in a particular location, eg, all the plants, animals and microorganisms living in a pond.

Relationships include

  • Predators – animals that eat other animals
  • Grazing – animals eating plants
  • Competition – two different species competing for resources.
  • Parasitism – a species lives on or in another species and feeds off them
  • Infection – one species infects another species, causing illness or death.
  • Mutaslim – two species living together and helping each other.
  • Commensalism – one species helps another species without return.

 

Abiotic

Abiotic from the greek prefix ‘a’ meaning not or without

These are the non-living things of an ecosystem. Abiotic facotsd fall into three groups

  1. Climate features – sun, wind and rain
  2. Facts affecting growth – soil condition, location.
  3. Key chemical elements – nitrogen, oxygen and water.

 

Biotic

Biotic from the greek word ‘bio’ meaning ‘life’

The organism that live and interatc in an ecosystem fall into three groups according to the way they onbtain thir food. The groups are:

  1. Producers
  2. Consumers
  3. Decomposers

 

Producer

Producers are oragnism (mainly green plants) that make their own food by a process caled photosynthesis.

Plants can be thought of as ‘Food Factories’ whicg provide most of the living organisms on earth within a soruce of energy and food.

They stary the food chain and are called ‘producers’.

 

Consumer

Consumers are oraganism that can’t make thier own food, so they feed on other organism to meet their nutritonaln reqirments, such as animals.

Consumers can be split into sub-groups:

  1. Herbiovore – Oraganisms that only eat plants
  2. Carnivore – Organisms that only eat meat.
  3. Omnirore – Organisms that eat both.

 

Decomposer

Decomposers, mainly worms, bacteria and fungi – live and feed on dead organisms.

Decomposers play a vital role in ecosystems by recycling nutrients.

Some insects, such as flies, are decomposers.

 

3 examples of these:

Carnivore – 

  • Great white shark
  • Lion
  • Hyenas

Omnivore –

  • Raccoons
  • Humans
  • Chimpanzees

Herbivore – 

  • Elephants
  • Pandas
  • Grasshoppers

Thanks for reading,

Shreeya