Ecosystems Ecosystems The plants and animals that are found in a particular location are referred to as an ecosystem. These plants and animals depend on each other to survive. In a delicate balance, these lifeforms help to sustain one another in regular patterns. As an example, consider what happens when a new plant or animal is introduced into an ecosystem where it did not before exist. Throughout the history of the Earth, the delicate balance found within ecosystems has been disrupted by natural disasters such as fires, floods, storms, volcano eruptions, and so forth.
Oceanus : Fertilizing the Ocean with Iron By Hugh Powell :: Originally published online : In print Vol. 46, No. 1, Jan. 2008 “Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age” may rank as the catchiest line ever uttered by a biogeochemist. The man responsible was the late John Martin, former director of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, who discovered that sprinkling iron dust in the right ocean waters could trigger plankton blooms the size of a small city. In turn, the billions of cells produced might absorb enough heat-trapping carbon dioxide to cool the Earth’s warming atmosphere. Never mind that Martin was only half serious when he made the remark (in his “best Dr. At the time, ice-core records suggested that during past glacial periods, natural iron fertilization had repeatedly drawn as much as 60 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. Twenty years on, Martin’s line is still viewed alternately as a boast or a quip; an opportunity too good to pass up or a misguided remedy doomed to backfire.
The freshwater biome Online exhibits : The world's biomes The freshwater biome Freshwater is defined as having a low salt concentration — usually less than 1%. Plants and animals in freshwater regions are adjusted to the low salt content and would not be able to survive in areas of high salt concentration (i.e., ocean). There are different types of freshwater regions: Ponds and lakes These regions range in size from just a few square meters to thousands of square kilometers. The topmost zone near the shore of a lake or pond is the littoral zone. The near-surface open water surrounded by the littoral zone is the limnetic zone. Plankton have short life spans — when they die, they fall into the deep-water part of the lake/pond, the profundal zone. Temperature varies in ponds and lakes seasonally. Streams and rivers These are bodies of flowing water moving in one direction. Wetlands Wetlands are areas of standing water that support aquatic plants.
How To Heat Up Your Room Using Just a Candle: Kandle Heeter! | Green Electronics This heater is a multi-core steel and ceramic radiator assembly, suspended above the candle on a solid steel stand. The radiator absorbs and concentrates the thermal energy of the candle and converts it into dry radiant space heat. If you burn candles, now you can add their heat to your home or office. There is also an “electric candle” option that uses a 60 watt quartz halogen lamp; that works out to about 6 cents for 10 hours of “burn” time. “Steel has the ability to approach the temperature of its heat source,” says the inventor, “so the solid steel inner core will go as high as 550° Fahrenheit. The simple elegant design has no moving parts. What’s new for 2008 is an “electric candle” option that takes advantage of the fact that 90% of the energy that goes into an incandescent lamp is “wasted” as heat. The electric candle is pictured below: The Kandle Heeter Candle Holder is available on Doyle Doss’s website, for $29.95.
Internet E-MAIL (ELECTRONIC MAIL) Every person has an e-mail address which takes the form of his or her name, the @ (at), and a domain name, such as jsmith@mammoth.com. The domain name contains the name of the person’s service provider or organization or provider and often its country, each separated by a dot. The domain name mammoth.com stands for Mammoth Corporation, which is a commercial organization (com). E-mail offers you more than a quick and easy way to send people written messages. It is possible to use e-mail to send computer data, such as word-processed documents and images. back to termsback to top SEARCH ENGINE You can locate useful or interesting web sites by using a search engine. back to terms back to top BACKBONE A network of routing computers – the Internet backbone – links organization and service providers. WEB SITE Every web site has an Internet address, which takes the form To visit a web site, your computer must have a browser.
researcher collaborates on important study of how ocean dead zones are shrinking habitat for blue marlins, other tropical billfish and tunas :: NOAA Fisheries Blue marlins and many other billfish are high energy fish that need large amounts of dissolved oxygen. By comparing the movement of the blue marlins and the location of low-oxygen areas, the study shows that blue marlins venture deeper when dissolved oxygen levels are higher and remain in shallower surface waters when low dissolved oxygen areas encroach on their habitat from below, squeezing them into surface waters. December 9, 2011 The science behind counting fish in the ocean to measure their abundance has never been simple. In the December 4 paper published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, these scientists sound an alarm that expanding ocean dead zones are shrinking the habitat for high value fish such as marlins in the tropical northeast Atlantic Ocean. In the past, Prince has studied the movement of marlins and other billfish in ocean waters off Florida and the Caribbean as well as in the tropical waters of the eastern Pacific.
Consumer-resource systems Figure 1. Consumer categories based on material eaten (plant: green shades are live, brown shades are dead; animal: red shades are live, purple shades are dead; or particulate: grey shades) and feeding strategy (gatherer: lighter shade of each color; miner: darker shade of each color). Consumer-resource interactions are the core motif of ecological food chains or food webs,[1] and are an umbrella term for a variety of more specialized types of biological species interactions including prey-predator (see predation), host-parasite (see parasitism), plant-herbivore and victim-exploiter systems. Classification of consumer types[edit] A fully inclusive nomenclature is shown in Figure 1. Specialist totivores (gatherers)[edit] Specialist olophages (miners)[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] Jump up ^ Bascompte, J. (2009).
Edward Wilson The classic article, published 2 decades ago by one of the world's great biologists & humanists Imagine that on an icy moon of Jupiter - say Ganymede - the space station of an alien civilization is concealed. For millions of years its scientists have closely watched the earth. The watchers have been waiting for what might be called the Moment. It was all but inevitable, the watchers might tell us if we met them, that from the great diversity of large animals, one species or another would eventually gain intelligent control of Earth. Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. The reason for this myopic fog, evolutionary biologists contend, is that it was actually advantageous during all but the last few millennia of the two million years of existence of the genus Homo. The rules have recently changed, however. Yet the awful truth remains that a large part of humanity will suffer no matter what is done.
Internet U.S. Army soldiers "surfing the Internet" at Forward Operating Base Yusifiyah, Iraq The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is a network of networks[1] that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), the infrastructure to support email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony. Most traditional communications media, including telephony and television, are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet Protocol television (IPTV). Terminology Users
Living in a Landscape of Fear: How Predators Impact an Ecosystem: Scientific American Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Cristina Eisenberg's book The Wolf’s Tooth. A doe burst out of the forest and tore across the meadow, two wolves in close pursuit. This drama unfolded not twenty feet from where my young daughters and I knelt in our garden peacefully pulling weeds, our pant legs wet with morning dew. One black, the other gray, the black wolf in the lead, they closed in on the doe's haunches. In less than two heartbeats they pierced the deep wood on the far side of the meadow, leaving a wake of quaking vegetation. We live at the base of a mountain in northwestern Montana. Landscapes shape us and speak to us on a primal level. Humans also have a primal relationship with large predators. I marked one track, and from it we located others laid out in a gallop pattern. In the fifteen years since wolves returned, the deer had been behaving differently—more wary, not standing in one place, eating all the shrubs down to nothing. "A tree," said some bright person.
Creative writing and kids: How to encourage it - chicagotribune.com June 14, 2011|By Wendy Donahue, Tribune Newspapers Parents nowadays worry more about the creative writing their kids do on Facebook than the kind in English assignments. But even for 140-character Tweets, encouraging children to put ideas into words is as vital as ever, says Pen Densham, screenwriter of films such as "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and a teacher at the University of Southern California. He shares his views on the role creative writing can play for children today. Q: Is creative writing an endangered skill in this tech age? A: No. Q: How can parents encourage creative writing in their children? A: Each kid is like an uncut diamond. Q: Why should adults encourage creative writing? A: It is important to embrace creativity for personal growth, not for an end result. We are traveling into a world where technology and humanity are changing at lightning speed. Money is not as important as being harnessed to a passion. Q: Can Facebook provide a real creative outlet?
Remote Antarctic island is 'richer in biodiversity than the Galapagos' Antarctica's remote South Georgia Island boasts 90 percent of the world's fur seals, half of the world's elephant seals, is navigated by vast populations of blue whales, sperm whales and killer whales, and has beaches that can be packed shoulder-to-shoulder with nesting penguins. In total, it contains nearly 1,500 recorded species, many of which are found nowhere else on Earth. It's difficult to believe that until recently, this biological treasure was believed to be nothing more than an "inhospitable lump of rock." In fact, researchers now believe that South Georgia Island contains more species than anywhere else in the Southern Ocean, and may be the most biologically diverse remote island in the world — even more diverse than the storied Galapagos Islands, according to the Independent. "It shows you don't have to be a tropical island or in a hot part of the world to support a lot of marine life. The types of marine life around the island vary immensely.