Intro to Environmental Science Exam 2

Coral reefs occupy about ____ of the ocean floor.

0.2%

In a certain population of rabbits, 25 new rabbits are born and five move into the population from surrounding areas during a single year. However, 10 rabbits die, and five leave the population during the same time frame. What is the population change for that year?

15

The species-area relationship suggests that if 90% of the habitat of a terrestrial species is lost, then ____.

50% of the species utilizing the area will go extinct

About how much energy is lost with each transfer from one trophic level to the next?

90%

Pronghorn antelope live in the high desert of the Great Basin in the western United States. Which of the following items are possible abiotic factors that an antelope has to contend with?v

Extreme maximum and minimum temperatures in the high desert

Tropical forests in the Amazon and other South American countries are cleared or burned primarily ____.

For cattle grazing and large soybean plantations

____ is the most common cause of speciation.

Geographic isolation

What is the cause of extinction and reduction in wild species that compete for resources with humans?

Human population growth

What is currently the most important threat to the survival of polar bears?

Limited hunting opportunities due to less floating ice

Which statement is true with regard to mutations?

Mutations that survive in a population are determined by natural selection.

A relationship in which both species benefit best illustrates ____.

Mutualism

The most common gas in the atmosphere is ____.

Nitrogen

Natural ecological restoration of riparian areas can happen if ____.

Overgrazed land is protected through rotational grazing

Which statement best describes an organism's habitat?

Place or type of ecosystem in which a species lives

A group of individuals of the same species living in a particular place is a(n) ____.

Population?

What is the best way to reduce threats from invasive species?

Prevention

Which term best describe the ability of a living system to be restored through secondary ecological succession after a severe disturbance?

Resilience

____ is the type of diversity that describes the number and variety of species present in any biological community.

Species diversity?

Which characteristic must be true in order for a trait to be impacted by the forces of natural selection and then play a role in the process of biological evolution?

The trait must be genetically based.?

Which of the following are examples of greenhouse gases?

Water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide

When bacteria are exposed to antibiotic medications, they can develop resistance so that the drugs no longer harm them. For this to occur, the bacteria must experience ____ followed by _____.

a beneficial mutation; natural selection

A population crash is also known as ____.

a dieback

Specialist species occupy ____.

a narrow ecological niche

An example of a producer is ____.

a photosynthetic bacterial species

The carrying capacity of a population is ____.

able to rise and fall

The abyssal zone of the ocean is characterized by ____.

abundant living organisms despite the lack of sunlight for photosynthesis

In debt-for-nature swaps, participating countries ____.

act as custodians of protected forest reserves in return for foreign aid or debt relief

A heritable trait that improves the ability of an individual organism to survive and to reproduce at a higher rate than other individuals in a population is called a(n) ____.

adaptation

A common misconception about evolution is that humans evolved from ___, when they actually evolved from _____.

apes or monkeys; a common ancestor shared with apes and moneys

A(n) _____ contains groundwater that has collected in layers of rock, sand, and gravel.

aquifer

The term "biomagnification" means that a chemical ____ at each trophic level in a food chain or web.

becomes more concentrated

Deserts, tropical forests, prairie grasslands, and coniferous forests have distinct climates and certain species; they are all examples of ____.

biomes

Large numbers of visitors to parks and protected areas ______.

can result in damage from the use of facilities and recreational vehicles

A K-selected species usually has a population size that is ____.

close to its carrying capacity

A species of snake has evolved resistance to a poisonous newt, allowing the snakes to prey on the newts. The newts have become more poisonous over time, as a result, leading to a kind of evolutionary arms race. This is an example of ____.

coevolution

A relationship in which one species benefits while the other is neither helped nor harmed to any significant degree best illustrates ____.

commensalism

Giant African millipedes often serve as the home for small mites that scavenge organic matter, but the millipedes do not appear to be affected by the interaction. This is an example of ____.

commensalism

When the algae in coral reefs die off due to environmental stresses, the coral subsequently dies because of lack of food. This process is referred to as ____.

coral bleaching

An endangered species is best described as any species that ____.

could soon become extinct

A(n) ____ is an extremely hot fire that leaps from treetop to treetop, burning whole trees.

crown fire

Organisms that consume wastes and remains of plants and animals are ____.

decomposers, usually bacteria and fungi

Which of the following could be considered a density-dependent limiting factor?

disease

The earth's variety of deserts, grasslands, forests, mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, and wetlands can be described as ____.

ecosystem diversity

The transition zone between two ecosystems or biomes is called a(n) ____.

ecotone

A trait that creates a specific advantage for some organisms in the struggle to survive ____.

enables individuals with the trait to leave more offspring than other members of the population leave ?

The collective term for factors that act to limit the growth of populations is ____.

environmental resistance

About 40% of the earth's photosynthetic activity occurs in the ____ of the open ocean.

euphotic zone

The variety of processes such as energy flow and matter cycling that occur within ecosystems as species interact with one another in food webs is called ________.

functional diversity

Species with broad niches are described as ____ species.

generalist

The variety of genes found in a species or population is known as ____.

genetic diversity

The earth's life-support system consists of four main spherical systems, including the air, water, living things, and the ____.

geosphere

An organism can be described as a tertiary consumer if it eats ____.

herbivores and carnivores

Traits that can be passed from one generation to the next are called ____ traits.

heritable

The ____ includes all of the water in all phases (solid, liquid, or gas) on or near the earth's surface.

hydrosphere

The Endangered Species Act was designed to ____.

identify and protect endangered species in the United States and abroad

In a population of wild bees, a mutation resulted in slightly larger wingspan in some of the bees. This larger wingspan made the bees more efficient in their flights to flowers to collect nectar. Thus, these bees became more successful at surviving and reproducing. This trait was passed on to offspring, and eventually the larger wingspan variety of bee replaced their smaller-winged relatives completely. Because this mutation produced a specific wing trait that was passed onto offspring, the mutation must have occurred ____.

in reproductive cells

Amphibians are very sensitive to chemicals in their environment and often show effects of harmful chemicals before other species do. This makes them useful as a(n) ____.

indicator species

The zone of a biosphere reserve where there is little, if any, disturbance from human activities is the ____.

inner core

In 1957, Brazil imported wild African honeybees to help increase honey production. The bees escaped and became established in the wild, displacing some native honeybee populations and leading to a reduced honey supply. These African honeybees could be described as ____.

invasive

Establishing international treaties that ban the transfer of potentially harmful species from one country to another is a good way to control ____.

invasive species

The term ____ specifically refers to species that are introduced to a new area and then compete with and harm other species, as opposed to other introduced species that may be harmless.

invasive species

Carbon is extremely important because ____.

it is an essential building block for organic molecules such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and nucleic acids such as DNA.

Biomes are ____.

large terrestrial regions of the earth with distinct climate and certain species typically occurring within them

The greatest threat to most species is ____.

loss of habitat

External agents such as radioactivity, ultraviolet radiation, and some chemicals are ____when they cause mutations.

mutagens

It could be said that ____ favored the bee with the larger wingspan, and so the ____ evolved.

natural selection; population

The role a species plays in its ecosystem is its ____.

niche

One challenge of laboratory research is that ____.

observations may not reflect what actually takes place in nature

In Indonesia, Malaysia, and other areas of Southeast Asia, tropical forests are being replaced by large ____ plantations.

oil palm

A grassy meadow high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of eastern California is known to support a variety of organisms. During the summers when grass is thick and lush, and wildflowers abound, butterflies take advantage of this abundant nectar source. Bears graze on the berries in shrubs at the edge of the meadow. Deer also forage at the edge of the meadow. In the early mornings, coyotes are known to prey on the squirrel and mouse populations that burrow into the meadow soil. A variety of birds prey on the butterflies and other flying insects, such as bees and wasps. If the biomass of flowers that support the butterflies was known to contain 100,000 units of energy, and certain bird species were eating the butterflies that foraged on the flowers, what amount of energy, on average, could be expected to be transferred to the birds?

omnivores

Life on earth depends on the ____ of ____ energy from the sun.

one-way flow; high-quality

Species that are r-selected are often____.

opportunists

Ecologists primarily focus on studying interactions from the level of ____ to the level of ____.

organisms; the biosphere

A relationship, in which one organism benefits by living on or in a member of another species, which is harmed by the interaction, best illustrates ____.

parasitism

Tapeworms live inside and may harm their hosts by drawing nourishment from them. This interaction is an example of ____.

parasitism

One threat to kelp forests is ____.

polluted water running off the land and into coastal waters

When an owl consumes a mouse, this is an example of ____.

predation

Hawks typically forage for their rodent prey species during the daytime. Although owls may eat similar prey species, and live in the same area, they forage during the night. This is best described as an example of ____.

resource partitioning

The mass movements of surface water ocean water are called ____.

rotational currents?

An organism that consumes living plant-eating animals is a(n) ___.

secondary consumer

A grassy meadow high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of eastern California is known to support a variety of organisms. During the summers when grass is thick and lush, and wildflowers abound, butterflies take advantage of this abundant nectar source. Bears graze on the berries in shrubs at the edge of the meadow. Deer also forage at the edge of the meadow. In the early mornings, coyotes are known to prey on the squirrel and mouse populations that burrow into the meadow soil. A variety of birds prey on the butterflies and other flying insects, such as bees and wasps. The coyotes would be classified as ____.

secondary consumers

Mountains ____.

serve as sanctuaries for animals that are driven from lowland areas

There are ____ separate Hadley cells in which warm air rises and cools, then falls and heats up again in great rolling patterns.

six

Ozone, a gas that filters out harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, is found in the ____.

stratosphere

One explanation for why polar regions are colder than equatorial regions is that ____.

sunlight strikes the polar regions at an angle and spreads out over a much larger area

K-selected species ____.

tend to reproduce later in life and have a small number of offspring with fairly long life spans

An orca is an example of a(n) ____.

tertiary consumer

Carrying capacity refers to ____.

the maximum population size that a particular habitat can sustain indefinitely

Ocean acidification is the result of ____.

the ocean absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

Sharks are important because ____.

they are keystone species that perform important ecosystem services, such as removing sick and injured animals from the population

Food chains and food webs show how producers, consumers, and decomposers are connected to one another as chemical energy flows through different ____ in an ecosystem.

trophic levels

A forest that is known for its year-round uniformly warm temperature is the ____.

tropical rainforest

The air we breathe is part of the lowermost layer of the atmosphere, which is called the ____.

troposphere

The current rate of extinction is ____ , compared to the historical background extinction rate.

up to 1,000 times higher

Ocean currents are most significantly affected by ____.

variation in winds over the ocean and changes in the shapes of land masses

A grassland with widely scattered clumps of trees located near the equator would be called a ____.

warm grassland

Poison dart frogs have bright coloration that is easily visible to other animals. This is an example of ____.

warning coloration that advertises their ability to harm predators