| A | B |
|---|
| biotic | living or recently living |
| abiotic | nonliving and not recently alive |
| producers | can make their own food from inorganic/abiotic materials like water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen in the soil |
| consumers | unable to make their own food; eat other organisms to stay alive |
| decomposers | subset of consumers; break down the bodies of dead plants and animals causing the process of decay |
| decay | takes large complex organic molecules and turn into small, simple, inorganic molecules |
| chemical energy | energy that is stored in the chemical bonds of molecules;all organisms use it to perform daily functions; breaks down chemical bonds |
| community | all the organisms that live and interact in one area |
| ecosytem | a biological community and its abiotic environment |
| food chain | one way of representing the flow of matter and energy through a community |
| gross primary productivity | the amount of energy that enters a given community through its producers; total amount of energy stored by photosynthesis |
| net primary productivity | the remaning energy of GPP available to consumers of a given community as food; what's not used by plants themselves |
| 10% rule | only 10% of GPP is available to consumers to use; only 10% of the energy at one level in the energy pyramid is available to organisms in the next level |
| carrying capacity | the limit to the number of organisms a community can support indefinitely with no damage to the community |
| 1 degree consumers | herbivores; highest carrying capacity |
| 2 degree consumers | carnivores; less carrying capacity |
| 3 degree amd above | omnivores; less carrying capacity than 1 and 2 |
| energy pyramid | represent the loss of energy from a food chain;each level contains only 10% of the energy of the level below it |
| scavenger | organisms that eat dead animals that they didn't kill |
| predator | preys on other animals for food |
| prey | animal eaten by a predator |
| food web | diagram of all food chains put together in a community |
| photosynthesis | process that plants use to convert sunlight into chemical energy |
| community | all the organisms that live and interact in one area |
| limiting factor | any biotic or abiotic factor that can affect the growth of a population |
| competition | occurs between two types of organisms when they both use the same limited resources; neither organism benefits |
| chemical bond | force that holds atoms together in a molecule |
| herbivores | organisms that eat plants |
| carnivores | organisms that eat meat |
| omnivores | organisms that eat both meat and plants |
