( 2:50) Another level up from communities are ecosystems, which are made up of groups of organisms in a specific area and the nonliving parts of their environment, like soil and water and air. If you take a bunch of living things and plop them down in one place that has a specific mix of climate and soil chemistry and topography, that's going to make up one kind of ecosystem. But if you put them down in a completely different place, they're going to work in completely different ways to form a completely different ecosystem. Ecosystem ecology specifically explores how energy and materials flow through an ecosystem, and how the physical environment impacts the stuff living there. Roger's Neighborhood, but with the people in the neighborhood eating each other sometimes. Because that's what species do when they live together, they interact. Sometimes that means predation, sometimes cooperation, and sometimes competition for resources like food, water and living space. So, a community ecologist studies how the interactions between community members and their environment affect how many of each species there are within a community. ( 2:24) When two or more populations of different species live together, we call that a community. You can think of an ecological community as Mr. ( 2:12) Like, when a bunch of members of a species are together in a certain area, and they interact pretty often, you've got a population. Population ecologists study why populations grow or shrink over time, depending on where they are. ( 2:01) And just as every organism has a hierarchy of biological systems, from molecules to organelles to cells to tissues to organs, so too does Earth have tiers of ecological order. In a way, you can think of all living things, great white sharks, pond scum, potato plants, as molecules that react with each other. Each one of us organisms is pretty piddling in the scheme of things, just like a single oxygen molecule, which we need to make ATP to fuel our bodies, but it can't get much done by itself. But if you get a million oxygen molecules together with some other types of molecules, suddenly they're unleashing a googlejillion megawatts of ATP power to animate the bag of meat that is you. This same principle applies to organisms: as you put individual organisms together, they can interact with each other and their environments, to create something larger than the sum of its parts. Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?įor the last 38 episodes of Crash Course Biology, we've talked about how to make an organism. And you know what I've learned in those 38 weeks? Putting a living thing together is hard! There are molecules that make up organelles that run cells, which come together to form tissues, which make up organs that make up systems. And knowing this stuff is incredibly important, because it shows us the ground rules for being a living thing, on this particular planet anyway. But still, there's so much more to biology than that! I mean, understanding how an organism goes about its internal business is great, but it doesn't tell us much about its place in our world. For that, we need ecology, the study of the rules of engagement for all of us Earthlings. Ecology seeks to explain why the world looks and acts the way that it does. Why the South Pole looks different from the Congo, and why there are mosquitoes all over the place while black rhinos are practically extinct. The short answer to this question is because the world is crammed with things, both animate and not, that have been interacting with each other all the time, every day, since life on this planet began. The even shorter answer is that all life and all of these things interacting with each other depend on just two things. Try to guess what they are. In the meantime, get ready, because Crash Course Biology is taking its final voyage outside the body and into the entire world! Learn what they are as Crash Course Biology takes its final voyage outside the body and into the entire world.Ĭan't wait to learn more about ecology? Good news! Crash Course Ecology has 12 episodes you can watch right here:Ĭrash Course is on Patreon! You can support us directly by signing up at The world is crammed with things, both animate and not, that have been interacting with each other all the time, every day, since life on this planet began, and these interactions depend mostly on just two things. Hank introduces us to ecology - the study of the rules of engagement for all of us earthlings - which seeks to explain why the world looks and acts the way it does.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |