To obtain resources, find mates, and find shelter, animals must traverse an area. The total area that animals travel to fulfill their needs is called its home range. Animals often have familiarity with their home ranges to better forage and hide or escape from predators. An animal’s home range can be occupied by a single …
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Owl Pellets
One fundamental part of ecology is an ecosystem. An ecosystem refers to all the living, or biotic, things within an environment, like plants and fungi; it also considers all the nonliving, or abiotic things within the environment, like water and soil. In an ecosystem, energy flows as a system from prey to predator. This …
Hardy-Weinberg
Evolution, the change in genotypic frequencies of a population over time, \ is a fundamental theory in ecology. Charles Darwin was the first to propose a mechanism to it, and that mechanism was natural selection. In his voyage on the HMS Beagle, Darwin drew three conclusions. For one, variation exists within a species. Secondly, some …
Tree Diversity
Diversity is a crucial part of the natural world. Primarily, it gives insight into the health of an ecosystem. Healthy ecosystems need high diversity in order to function well and provide its variety of services. Most know that biodiversity is different between different ecosystems; desert life is different from rainforest life. However, diversity can also …
Adaptations of Oak Leaves
When one thinks of phenotypic variation, they often think of variation between individuals, but many fail to realize that phenotypes can vary within an individual as well. Typically, within-individual phenotypic variation is due to natural selection. A tree, for example, may have varied leaves. Leaves have two primary functions: capturing sunlight for photosynthesis and taking …
Human Survivorship
Some ecologists study population dynamics, or the changes in a population over time in regard to abundance, distribution, and composition. Typically, the most influential factors that affect a population are birth rates, death rates, age structure, and migration in or out of the population. To better understand a population, ecologists may study it from life …
Plant Dispersion Data Analysis
When determining the spatial structure of a population, ecologists look at three properties: distribution, density, and dispersion. Distribution is how the population is spread out over a landscape, or a population’s range. Density refers to the number of individuals in a given unit of area or volume. Lastly, dispersion is the arrangement of individuals of …
Plant Dispersion Patterns
To define the special structure of a population, scientists look at three properties: distribution, density, and dispersion. Distribution refers to a population’s range over a geographical landscape. Furthermore, density reflects the number of individuals per unit of area or volume. Lastly, dispersion is defined by how members of a population arrange themselves in their area. …
Optimal Foraging Lab
An optimal forager is an organism that maximizes their net gain of energy while foraging. Energy gain is a way that scientists can measure the fitness of an organism. As one would expect, the greater the net energy gain, the greater the fitness. When animals are in the wild, prey are distributed among patches of …
Biodiversity Data Analysis
In the previous two experiments, students set out to measure the biodiversity of two communities in Chattanooga: Signal Point Park and the Confederate Cemetery. This week, students aimed to analyze the data of the whole class that was collected during this time and compare the biodiversity of the two communities. To do this, students used …
Exploring Ecology 