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Definition. The term habitat fragmentation includes five discrete phenomena: Reduction in the total area of the habitat. Decrease of the interior: edge ratio. Isolation of one habitat fragment from other areas of habitat. Breaking up of one patch of habitat into several smaller patches. Decrease in the average size of each patch of habitat.
A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Ecologists can broadly define all life forms as either autotrophs or heterotrophs, based on their trophic levels, the position that they occupy in the food web.
A consumer in a food chain is a living creature that eats organisms from a different population. A consumer is a heterotroph and a producer is an autotroph. Like sea angels, they take in organic moles by consuming other organisms, so they are commonly called consumers. Heterotrophs can be classified by what they usually eat as herbivores ...
Ecological niche. The flightless dung beetle occupies an ecological niche: exploiting animal droppings as a food source. In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. [1][2] It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for example, by growing when ...
Habitat destruction. Map of the world's biodiversity hot spots, all of which are heavily threatened by habitat loss and degradation. Habitat destruction (also termed habitat loss and habitat reduction) occurs when a natural habitat is no longer able to support its native species. The organisms once living there have either moved to elsewhere or ...
Chloroplasts probably evolved following an endosymbiotic event between an ancestral, photosynthetic cyanobacterium and an early eukaryotic phagotroph. [17] This event (termed primary endosymbiosis) is at the origin of the red and green algae (including the land plants or Embryophytes which emerged within them) and the glaucophytes, which together make up the oldest evolutionary lineages of ...
Food chain in a Swedish lake. Osprey feed on northern pike, which in turn feed on perch which eat bleak which eat crustaceans.. A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web, often starting with an autotroph (such as grass or algae), also called a producer, and typically ending at an apex predator (such as grizzly bears or killer whales), detritivore (such as earthworms and woodlice ...
A nutrient cycle (or ecological recycling) is the movement and exchange of inorganic and organic matter back into the production of matter. Energy flow is a unidirectional and noncyclic pathway, whereas the movement of mineral nutrients is cyclic. Mineral cycles include the carbon cycle, sulfur cycle, nitrogen cycle, water cycle, phosphorus ...