An ecosystem is a community of living organisms and the nonliving components of the environment Energy flows in an ecosystem in
one direction through food chains, and a food web is made up of all the food chains within a community of organisms. Biodiversity refers to the variation in species found within an ecosystem, and it is measured in two ways: (1) species richness, which is the total number of different species in an ecosystem; and (2) relative abundance, which is a measure of how common each species is within the ecosystem
Imagine that carnivore D represents the sea lamprey in the Great Lakes ecosystem. This invasive species has been present there
since the 1800's yet the ecosystem has remained stable. How can you explain this?
A) The sea lampreys are indigenous to salt water and have a very short life
span
B) There are complex feeding mechanisms at work to protect the other
species in the food web.
C) The sea lampreys only feed on one type of fish so they have only depleted
that single population.
D) Marine scientists have developed a method to effectively remove the
Lampreys from the Great Lakes.
A, because of evolution things are constantly changing. DNA is written with letters and we are nearly identical but yet a few chromosomes make up our differences, but everyone has the possibility of a bad bacterial causing a DNA change which completely changes our reading
