Foss Environments Module
Environmental Factors
 A relationship exists between a number of
environmental factors and how well organisms grow.
 Environments factors (living or nonliving) can either
help an organism grow or prevent it from growing.
 Some factors could be temperature, amount of rain, or
the quality of the air or water.
Preferred Environmental
Conditions
 Each organism has a set of preferred environmental
conditions.
 The isopods we observed preferred to be in a dark and
wet environment.
 That’s why the isopods tried to get under the black
construction paper roof on our terrarium.
Range of Tolerance
 Organisms have ranges of tolerance for environmental
factors.
 The range will be the high and low extremes of
tolerance for an environmental factor.
 Organisms have specific requirements for successful
growth, development and reproduction.
 Example: There may be a coldest temperature and
hottest temperature an animal can survive in their
environment. That is their range of tolerance.
Optimum Conditions
 Conditions that are most favorable for an organism to
survive, grow and reproduce.
 This optimum is somewhere WITHIN the RANGE OF
TOLERANCE for that organism.
 If an animal has a range of tolerance for temperature of
0-85 degree F somewhere within that temperature
range will be the temperature that the animal grows
BEST.