Summary: Introduction To Animal Ecology

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• 1 introduction to animal ecology

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• A student wants to prove that their research is significant using statistics. What’s wrong with this approach?

  • The approach is wrong because statistics cannot be used to prove something; it is used to disprove a null hypothesis

• A researcher is studying how individual single-celled organisms of the same species are affected by water temperature. This is an example of studying ecology at what level?

  • Organismal

• You are conducting an experiment in a large pond to observe how the input from fertilizer runoff affects the native pond community. You find that many amphibians are not able to survive in this pond when the nitrogen levels are high. What could you do next to best test if nitrogen concentrations affect amphibians?

  • Experimentally raise frogs in a controlled laboratory experiment where some are exposed to water from the pond at certain periods of time and others only raised in filtered water for the duration of the experiment

• You are interested in finding out why crayfish can eat many toxic or noxious amphibian species. You find through a research project of the primary literature that the species of crayfish you are interested in has evolved from a lineage of ancestors that appears to have had resistance. This is a i) proximate explanation or ii) ultimate explanation?

  Ultimate explanation

• What type of experiment takes organisms from a variety of sources and rears them under the same conditions?

  • Common garden experiment

• You take a research trip to Australia and observe that the wombat appears to be a similar looking species to a ground hog you have studied in North America. These two species have evolved in separate, but climatically similar environments, and they have developed closely corresponding adaptive features. This is a clear example of:

  • Convergent evolution

• A recent examination of two geographically isolated populations of mountain sheep indicates there has been long-standing separation between the two populations. An analysis shows that the two populations are actually different species. What type of speciation likely occurred?

  • Allopatric

• While you’re walking your dog, you observe two snails interacting on a turf of grass. You recognize that they are two separate species. The two individuals are attempting to mate, but the direction of the turn in the shell prevents the two species from successfully mating. This is an example of:

  • A pre-zygotic barrier

• Conditions can affect disease dynamics. A grasshopper species will escape serious infection by a fungal pathogen by modifying what condition?

  • Its body temperature, and it does so by basking

• Which type of organism feeds on already dead material?

  • Decomposer