Study Guide for Ecology Section
Biol 240 Fall 2022
Study Guide for Cumulative Material on Final Exam 2022
1. What is Natural Selection?
2. What are the three main types of main types of Natural Selection?
3. When determining a type of Natural Selection from an example, why is it helpful to
understand how a trait is changing?
4. Review phylogeny. Specifically, review scenarios such as “Is X animal more closely
related to Y animal or Z animal?”
5. Understand how to read mapped character state changes on a phylogeny. Example: on a
phylogeny of parrots, eagles, and falcons, where would you place a character state change
of ‘colored feathers evolve’?
6. What evidence do we have for the Endosymbiotic Theory?
7. What are the two primary endosymbionts in photosynthetic green plants?
8. What are the major steps in the Endosymbiotic Theory?
9. What traits were important for vertebrates transitioning to life on land? What precursors
were present in the ancestors to terrestrial vertebrates?
Ecology section study guide
10. Understand the factors that determine the distribution and abundance of species. Know
key examples of abiotic and biotic factors that can limit populations.
11. Understand how competition can affect species distributions.
12. Know the difference between the fundamental and realized niche and what determines
each.
13. Understand the intertidal system and how competition for limited space determines the
distribution of populations like Chthamalus and Balanus barnacles. Based on each
species’ fundamental and realized niche, what response is expected if one or the other
species were experimentally removed?
14. How do populations grow when there is no resource limitation? How do populations
grow when there is resource limitation?
15. Know what density-dependent and density-independent factors affect populations
16. Understand what a population carrying capacity is.
17. Understand the logistic growth equation. How does the growth rate (dN/dt) fchange as
the population size changes?
18. What is the definition of a trophic level? How does energy move through trophic levels?
Where is biomass concentrated?
19. Know what a keystone species is and know examples of how they can affect their
community.
20. How are biological communities described and measured? What is species evenness?
Species richness? Species diversity?
21. What is the nature of community interactions such as competition or predation?
22. Know what a trophic cascade is and how it works. Who is affected?
23. Understand what ecosystem functions are and how biodiversity affects these functions.
24. Understand the difference between miasma theory and germ theory and what they tell
us about where diseases come from.
25. What is the disease triangle. What component(s) of the disease triangle led to the
emergence of SARS-CoV-2? Be able to identify how the disease triangle can help
identify the causes of other emerging infectious diseases.
26. What are the historic and current drivers of climate change? How does energy flow
through ecosystems and Earth’s atmosphere under normal conditions and under climate
change?
You should be familiar with reading and interpreting graphs and figures.
1. Be able to identify the x and y axes of a figure.
2. In the figure below, be able to understand where the carrying capacity is. What is the
growth rate, r, at each of the points, A-D? What happens to growth rate when N is close
to 0 or close to K?
3. Understand the intertidal competition experiments performed on Chthamalus and
Balanus by Joseph Connell. Know the difference between realized and fundamental
niche. Which species was living in their full fundamental niche, which was not?
Understand the challenges of living in the high versus low intertidal region.