Unit 7 Reflection

In this unit we learned all about ecology, including the threats and solutions. We learned about the factors that affect populations like immigration, the influx of new individuals from other areas, emigration, the movement of individuals out of a population, births, deaths, disease, predators, and lastly abiotic factors such as limitation of resources. Some other things that we learned in this unit was succession, Succession is the sequence of a community and ecosystem changes after a disturbance. The cycle of succession involves the circle of disturbance, pioneers, intermediate and climax. We also learned about the 4 different cycles, the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the phosphorous cycle. All of these cycles have their own significance in the ecosystem. We also learned about the threats of a population, such as habitat loss, introduced species that could be predators, over-exploitation and climate change with the increase in carbon emissions. The last part that we covered in our vodcasts is the way that energy transfers up the food chain. The 10% rule states that of the energy that is produced on 10% is passed on to the next level. This means that as you go up the food chain, less and less energy is being passed on.

Some things that I would like to learn more about is more about how fossil fuels are hurting our ecosystem and how we can reduce the use of them. Some unanswered questions that I have are, is there more cycles that we have not learned about, like the phosphorous cycle? How many are there?

Onto our project that we did that related to this unit, the Conservation Biologist Project. We worked in groups to find information about any region that we wanted to do and we had to talk about the ecosystem there. Our group chose the Great Barrier Reef. I will link the video to the blog. Some things that went really well was that our group was able to collaborate and listen to everyone's ideas so that we could work efficiently and not run into any problems. I learned about how the Great Barrier Reef had many threats that could harm its ecosystem very much and that there needed to be something done about it. I think that our collaboration went very well because everybody took everyone's ideas into consideration when making the video along with the fact that we had no problems splitting up the work and finding information regarding the topic.

This is our video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTZQcWUaM8k
A picture of the food chain of the Great Barrier Reef