Community Ecology
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51 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Aposematic Coloration | The bright coloration of animals with effective physical or chemical defenses that acts as a warning to predators |
| Batesian Mimicry | A type of mimicry in which a harmless species looks like a species that is poisonous or otherwise harmful to predators |
| Biomanipulation | A technique for restoring eutrophic lakes that reduces populations of algae by manipulating the higher-level consumers in the community rather than by changing nutrient levels or adding chemical treatments |
| Biomass | The dry weight of organic matter comprising a group of organisms in a particular habitat |
| Bottom-up model | A model of community organization in which mineral nutrients control community organization because nutrients control plant numbers, which in turn control herbivore numbers, which in turn control predator numbers |
| Character displacement | The tendency for characteristics to be more divergent in sympatric populations of 2 species than in allopatric populations of the same 2 species |
| Coevolution | The mutual evolutionary influence between two different species interacting with each other and reciprocally influncing each other's adaptations |
| Commensalism | A symbiotic relationship in which one organism benefits but the other is neither helped nor harmed |
| Community | All the organisms that inhabit a particular area |
| Competitive exclusion | The concept that when populations of two similar species competer for the same limited resources, one population will use the resources more efficiently and have a reproductive advantage that will eventually lead to the elimination of the other population |
| Cryptic Coloration | Camouflage, making potential prey difficult to spot against its background |
| Disturbance | A force that changes a biological community and usually removes organisms from it. Play pivotal roles in structuring many biological communities |
| Dominant species | Those species in a community that have the highest abundance or highest biomass. These species exert a powerful control over the occurence and distribution of other species |
| Dynamic Stability Hypothesis | The idea that long food chains are less stable than short food chains |
| Ecological Niche | The sum total of a species' use of the biotic and abiotic factors in its environment |
| Ecological Succession | Transition in the species composition of a biological community, often following ecological disturbance of the community; the establishment of a biological community in an area virtually barren of life |
| Ectoparasite | A parasite that feeds on the external surface of a host |
| Endoparasite | A parasite that lives within a host |
| Energetic Hypothesis | The concept that the length of a food chain is imited by the inefficiency of energy transfer along the chain |
| Evapotranspiration | The evaporation of water from soil plus the transpiration of water from plants |
| Facilitator | A species that has a positive effect on the survival and reproduction of other species in a community and that contributes to community structure |
| Food chain | The pathway along which food is transferred from trophic level to trophic level, beginning with producers |
| Food web | The elaborate, interconnected feeding relationships in an ecosystem |
| Herbivory | An interaction in which an herbivore eats parts of a plant or alga |
| Host | The larger participant in a symbiotic relationship, serving as home and feeding ground to the symbiont |
| Individualistic Hypothesis | The concept that a plant community is a chance assemblage of species found in the same area simply because they happent to have similar abiotic requirements |
| Integrated Hypothesis | The concept that a community is as assemblage of closely linked species, locked into association by mandatory biotic interactions that cause the community to function as an integrated unit, or superorganism |
| Intermediate disturbance hypothesis | The concept that moderate levels of disturbance can foster greater species diversity than low or high levels of distrubance |
| Interspecific interaction | Relationships between species of a community |
| Interspecific competition | competition for resources between plants, between animals, or between decomposers when resources are in short supply |
| Invasive species | A species that takes hold outside of its native range, usually introduced by humans |
| Keystone species | A species that is not necessarily abundant in a community yet exerts strong control on community structure by the nature of its ecological role or niche |
| Mullerian Mimicry | A mutual mimcry by two unpalitable species |
| Mutualism | A symbiotic relationship in which both participants benefit |
| Nonequilibrium model | The model of communities that emphasizes that they are not stable in time but constantly changing after being buffeted by disturbances |
| Parasite | An organism that benefits by living in or on another organism at the expense of its host |
| Parasitism | A symbiotic relationship in which the symbiont benefits at the expense of the host by living either within the host or outside the host |
| Parasitoidism | A type of parasitism in which an insect lays eggs on or in a living host; the larvae then feed on the body of the host, eventually killing it |
| Pathogen | A disease-causing agent |
| Predation | An interaction between species in which one species, the predator, eats the other, the prey. |
| Primary Succession | A type of ecological succession that occurs in a virtually lifeless area, where there were originally no organisms and where soil has not yet formed |
| Redundancy model | The concept that most of the species in a community are not tightly couple with one another |
| Relative abundance | Differences in the abundance of different species within a community |
| Resource partitioning | The division of environmental resources by coexisting species such that the niche of each species differs by one or more significant factors from the niches of all coexisting species |
| Rivet model | The concept that many or most of the species in a community are associated tightly with other species in a web of life. |
| Secondary Succession | A type of succession that occurs where an existing community has been cleared by some disturbances that leaves the soil intact |
| Species diversity | The number and relative abundance of species in a biological community |
| Species richness | The number of species in a biological community |
| Species-area curve | The biodiversity pattern, that illustrates that the larger the geographic area of a community, the greater the number of species |
| Top-down model | A model of community organization in which predation controls organization because preadators control herbivores, which in turn control plants, which in turn control nutrient levels; aka trophic cascade model |
| Trophic structure | The different feeding relationships in an ecosystem, which determine the route of energy flow and the pattern of chemical cyclin |
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