Ecology Terms

3. Waste from plants and animals, including their dead remains. This is important in terms of recycling matter back into the environment.
5. A defined area where certain populations interact
7. The living component of the environment
10. An animal that eats other animals (eg. lion, sharks)
12. A step-by-step sequence linking organisms that feed on each other, starting with a food source (producers) and continuing with animals and other living things that feed on the plants and on each other (consumers)
14. Non-living factors in the environment (water, air, temperature etc.)
15. An organism that hunts other organisms
16. A heterotroph (other-feeder); an organism that must eat producers or other consumers to survive
17. When there is a great variety of organisms in an area

1. An animal that eats both plants and animals (eg. raccoons, humans, bears)
2. An organism that gets hunted by other organism
4. An animal that eats plants (eg. deer, rabbits etc.)
6. All of the members of a species living in the same ecosystem (eg. all the trout in a lake)
8. The study of the interaction of living things with each other and with the abiotic (non-living) factors in their environment
9. An autotroph (self-feeder); an organism that uses photosynthesis or another form of chemical synthesis to make its own food
11. Complex set of interactions between organisms; more complicated than a food chain
13. The collection of all the populations of all the species in an ecosystem (eg. all of the different species of fish, frogs, insects etc. in a lake)