Ecology Lab Report: Discussing the 3 things that ecologists do: Mark, Recapture, Release, Survivorship Curves and Food Web.

Essay by freechongCollege, UndergraduateA-, May 2007

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Ecology is the study of organisms and their relationship with their surroundings. It is the study of the interaction between the many different members of a species with each other, with other organisms, and with the chemical and the physical environment. A first step to understanding individual animals, and in turn populations of animals, is to understand the relationship they have with their environment. A species is all the organisms of a group that reproduce and produce fertile offspring in nature. Species are divided up into populations that are separated from one another by a physical or chemical barrier. The populations of different species that live and act together form a community. The community of organisms and their environment form an ecosystem. Organisms play different important roles in an ecosystem.

Three experiments that simulate the different themes that are involved in ecology are Mark, Recapture and Release, Survivorship Curves and Food web.

Mark, Release and Recapture are methods used by ecologists to study a certain population of animals in an ecosystem. An ecosystem is a system whose members benefit from each other's participation by symbiotic relationships. Survivorship curves tell us something about how long individuals survive in a population. There are three types of survivorship curves; Type I, II, and III. Type I survivorship curves are for species that have a high survival rate of the young, live out most of their expected life span and die in old age. Type II survivorship curves are for species that have a relatively constant death rate throughout their life span. Death could be due to hunting or diseases. Type III survivorship curves are found in species that have many young, most of which die very early in their life. In the following experiment a survivorship curve is simulated for a Type III...