1. Dr. Pringle discussed three levels of organization that involve components of
ID: 177029 • Letter: 1
Question
1. Dr. Pringle discussed three levels of organization that involve components of ecosystems including (1) habitat, (2) ecosystem, and (3) biome. Describe one emergent property for each of these three levels of spatial organization.
2. Provide a description of the three major components of the savanna (biological system) in this paper, (1) plant, (2) herbivore, and (3) predator and briefly describe how they depend on one another.
3. Use the data in Figure 3A and 3B to evaluate the following hypothesis: "Impala prefer to consume poorly defended plants". Please keep your written evaluation to 3-4 sentences.
Explanation / Answer
1. ANS:
In the lecture titled, Africa's Savanna Ecosystems Dr. Robert Pringle nicely represented and combines the field ecology, experimental biology and mathematical modeling to understand how plant and animal communities are organized, how natural patterns arise, and the effects of human impacts, including species extinctions and climate changes taken placed in an African savanna. He includes…….
1. Habitat:
The environment in which the species are normally lives OR the location of a living organism is called as habitat. In savanna Dr. Pringle observed in terms of spatial scale, the lion and the waterbuck is effectively the habitat for those species. Habitats are nested within larger ecosystems or landscapes.
2. Ecosystem:
All the organisms which live in a similar area along with the nonliving materials is referred as ecosystem. In an African savanna the greater Gorongosa ecosystem that is home to this lion and waterbuck and cattle egret. And the larger ecosystems and landscapes are embedded within biomes.
3. Biome:
It refers a group of ecosystem. Biomes are being largely determined by climatic factors.
Ex: Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin rainforest in green, tropical forest in Southeast Asia, big deserts in Australia and the Sahara in North Africa.
In this lecture Dr. Robert Pringle specifically presented about the African savanna biome. Savanna is globally important in terms of its extent. It covers about 20% of the global land surface, and it covers more than half of Africa.
2. ANS: The three major components of the savanna (biological system):
1. Plants:
Plants are going to be competing with each other by having different rooting zones, trees can access water that's deeper in the soil than grasses, trees compete with grasses for light by shading them out. And grasses can compete with trees, especially with young trees.
2. Herbivore:
And three biotic interactions, specifically three types of large mammalian herbivores elephants, browsers, which eat trees and forbs and shrubs, and grazers, which eat grasses are consigned to relatively lower importance. The biotic interactions are really crucial to understanding in these systems.
3. Predator:
The apex predators present in savanna are lions, leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs, hyenas and bat-eared foxes at the predator trophic level. These predators always depend on herbivores for food.
In the tropical food chain pyramid the predators are placed at apex and herbivores there in the yellow bar and plants at the bottom.
3. ANS:
Ecology behind the figure 3A and 3B:
In low-risk areas Impala (Aepyceros melampus) are abundantly survived. It is due to among this region impala’s main predators lepord (Panthera pardus) and African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) are mostly absent. According to this research article in this low risk area Well-defended thorny Acacia trees (A. etbaica) are highly grown and the growth of poorly defends trees without thrones (A. brevispica) are very less.
In another case of high-risk areas (predators most evenly found), that is avoided by impala due to its herbivores’ risk-avoidance behavior. In this region poorly defended trees (A. brevispica) were more abundant in this high- risk areas when compare to low-risk areas.
Both figure 3A and 3B clearly explains the ecology of large carnivores’ impact on plant defenses interactively shape and plant distributions.
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