Eyewitness ECOLOGY
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Eyewitness ECOLOGY (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Eyewitness Ecology (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Red seaweed Squid Apparatus to measure water quality Sun star Population of woodlice Merlin Tullgren funnel (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Eyewitness Ecology Marble Written by gall and STEVE POLLOCK oak leaf Sample of chalky soil Sample of heathland soil Black tip reef shark Foliose lichen Sample of garden soil Mandarin fish Cook’s tree boa (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Garfish LONDON, NEW YORK, MUNICH, MELBOURNE, and DELHI Pine cones Project Editor Ian Whitelaw Art Editor Val Cunliffe Designer Helen Diplock Production Louise Daly Picture Research Catherine O’Rourke Managing Editor Josephine Buchanan Managing Art Editor Lynne Brown Rag worm Special Photography Frank Greenaway, The Natural History Museum, London Editorial Consultant Dr David Harper, Pine seeds Sweet chestnut University of Sussex Horse seed U.S. Editor Charles A. Wills chestnut seed U.S. Consultant Professor O. Roger Anderson, Teachers College, Columbia University R E Editors Barbara Berger, Laura Buller Editorial assistant John Searcy Publishing director Beth Sutinis Senior designer Tai Blanche Designers Jessica Lasher, Diana Catherines Photo research Chrissy Mclntyre Cuckoo wrasse Art director Dirk Kaufman Yeast culture in petri dish DTP designer Milos Orlovic Production Ivor Parker This edition published in the United States in 2005 by DK Publishing, Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 Copyright © 1993 © 2005 Dorling Kindersley Limited All rights reserved under International and Pan- American Copyright Conventions. No part of this Bomb calorimeter publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission Field digger wasp of the copyright owner. Published in Great Britain by capturing fly Dorling Kindersley Limited. Wolf spider A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN-13: 978-0-7566-1387-7 (PLC) ISBN-13: 978-0-7566-1396-9 (ALB) Color reproduction by Colourscan, Singapore Printed in China by Toppan Printing Co., Orkney vole (Shenzhen) Ltd. Discover more at (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Contents 6 What is ecology? 8 Nature’s producers 10 Plants, fungi, and seeds of The transfer of energy the deciduous forest floor 12 Food webs 44 14 Leaves and needles Recycling to live 46 16 Riches of the reef The water cycle 48 18 Sharing the grasslands Carbon on the move 50 20 Where river meets sea Keeping the Earth fertile 52 22 Scaling the heights The life-giving soil 54 24 Fresh waters The distribution of life 56 26 Incredible diversity Ecological niche 58 28 Human ecology Studying populations 30 60 Checks on population growth Human impact 32 62 Family strategies Ecology today 34 64 Time and nature Did you know? 36 66 Ecology and evolution Zones of life 38 68 Life in the ocean Find out more 40 70 Surviving in arid lands Glossary 42 72 A world of ebb and flow Index (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. What is ecology? N or group of living things exists in isolation. All organisms, both plants and animals, need energy and materials from the environment in order to survive, and the lives of all kinds of living things, or species, affect the lives of others. Ecology is the study of the relationships between living things (within species and between different species), and between them and their environment. Humans have always studied living things in their natural environment in order to hunt and to gather food, but as a scientific discipline ecology is relatively new. Ecologists do study species in their natural context PROVIDING THE ESSENTIALS (“in the field”) but they also carry out laboratory studies and experiments. All organisms depend on a variety of factors in the Fieldwork involves the collection of environment. These include light, temperature, the information to see what happens to chemicals or nutrients that particular species – such as population enable plants and animals to grow and, most important, numbers, diet, form, size, and water. In an artificial context behaviour. Ecologists also study the like a garden, all these factors must be provided if the plants physical environment – such as the are to grow successfully. composition of rocks, soil, air, and water. The data can be used to identify patterns and trends, and some of these can be tested in the laboratory. STICKING TOGETHER Algae on pot Individual animals very rarely live on their own. BACKYARD ECOLOGY They are usually to be found in a population, A garden provides a small-scale model of life all over planet interacting with others of their species, as these Earth. Rocks and soil, rain and wind, animals and plants exist woodlice are doing. Members of a population together, each affecting the others directly and indirectly, compete with each other for resources, including gradually changing the landscape. A plant takes up chemicals food and shelter. They also interbreed to produce from the soil, flowers and produces seeds. A mouse eats the new generations, ensuring the continued life of seeds, and a cat preys on the mouse. The plant dies and begins the population as it copes with seasonal and to decay. A worm eats the rotting plant and returns the long-term changes in the environment. Studies of chemicals to the soil. Ecology is the particular populations are common in ecology. study of these kinds of interaction between plants, animals, and the non-living elements in the environment. Cat (predator) Flowering plant Lichen-covered rock Soil provides essential nutrients for plant growth (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Bee Heather flower COINING THE TERM In 1866, German biologist and TWOWAY TRAFFIC evolutionist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) Many relationships between used the word “oecology” to denote different species are far more the study of organisms and their complex than simply that of animal interactions with the world around and food plant, or predator and prey. This them, He based it on the Greek bee is visiting the flowers of the heather in search word “oikos”, meaning of the nectar on which it feeds, but the plant benefits “household”. This is also the from the bee’s visit too. The bee will carry away pollen origin of the word economy, from the flower on its body, and this pollen will and Haeckel clearly saw the fertilize other heather flowers as the bee continues living world as a community in its search. The nectar that attracts the bee ensures the which each species had a role survival of the plant. Such relationships are an to play in the global economy. important part of ecology. The modern spelling of ecology was first used in 1893. Biosphere A HIERARCHY OF COMPLEXITY Living things can be studied at six different Biome levels. Firstly, there is the individual, a plant or an animal belonging to a particular species. A group of individuals of the same species is called a Ecosystem population. Different populations of species exist together in a community, and several different communities may be found together in a characteristic way, creating an ecosystem. Community Different ecosystems are found together in a single geographical zone, sharing the same climatic conditions and constituting a biome (as in the map below). All the Earth’s varied biomes together make up Population the highest level of organization, the biosphere, the thin life-bearing layer that forms the outer surface of the planet. Individual EARTH’S MAJOR LIFE ZONES The planet’s land surfaces can be divided into zones, or biomes, according to the climate and other physical factors in each area. Each biome has a distinctive combination of life forms that are able to thrive in the particular conditions found there, and each has a distinctive kind of vegetation. In this book, some of the major biomes are discussed, as well as some habitats that are distributed around the globe, such as coral reefs and fresh waters, which do not form continuous zones in themselves. Although many factors influence the locations of the biomes, this map reveals that latitude – distance from the equator – has a noticeable effect. Mouse (prey) Tundra Temperate Savannah Temperate Temperate forest grassland rainforest Boreal Desert Tropical Mountain Scrubland forest rainforest 7 (c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Nature’s primary producers P . For this reason, they are called autotrophic (self-feeding). They use pigments such as chlorophyll, the green pigment in leaves, to capture light energy, which they then turn into stored chemical energy to fuel their life processes. This two-stage process is called photosynthesis. Ecologists refer to plants as producers because they SPRING FLOWERS All plants need light, produce new living (organic) material from non-living (inorganic) so the woodland materials. The rate at which energy is stored by plants is called bluebell must grow and flower before the the net primary productivity of the ecosystem. The Sun is the trees produce leaves and hide the sun. source of all this energy, but only a tiny fraction of the energy reaching this planet is actually used to create plant material. About half is absorbed by the atmosphere. Only one-quarter of the rest is of the right wavelength for photosynthesis, and very little of this is actually converted into plant material. In grasslands, about 0.4 per cent of the total incoming radiation ends up in net primary production. In forests this can reach 1 per cent, while in the ocean it may be as low as 0.01 per cent.