Unit 7 Reflection

  In Unit 7, my class and I learned about ecology, which is the study of interactions between organisms and their environment. In an environment, there are both biotic, meaning all living things, and abiotic factors, meaning non living things such as wind or rain. There are many different levels of organization, it fist starts with an organism, then comes its population, then community, also an ecosystem, then comes the biome, and lastly, there is the biosphere. In the ecosystem, there are both producers, plants, and consumers, organisms that get food from producers. We are able to see the energy pass through the ecosystem with food chains and food webs. In a food chain, there are five different labels, including primary producer, primary consumer, secondary consumer, tertiary consumer, and quaternary consumers. A food web is more accurate than a food chain because most animals eat an array of different foods. You can also see the energy being transferred by using an energy pyramid. For every level of the pyramid, 90% of the energy is lost as waste. Lastly, the most important thing we learned about was about Ecosystem Health. In an ecosystem, there are many different types of diversity from genetic diversity to ecosystem diversity. Though there is a huge amount of diversity throughout the world, much of it is on the verge of becoming extinct. In the world, about 24% of mammals are threatened with extinction, yet the most affected ones are the amphibians with 41%. There are many cause of extinction including habitat loss and over exploitation.

    After finishing this unit, I am interested in learning more about how energy travels through the ecosystems and all the different cycles, like the carbon cycle. The only unanswered question that remains is, are humans the ones to blame for all of this extinction?


   Going off of the Ecosystem Health, we were assigned to do a conservation ecology project with our group partners. Through this project, not only did we become more educated on the problems some ecosystems are facing, but we also learned how to work better in a team. Through this project, I learned about many different conflicts and threats that real life ecosystems face. This project really opened my eyes to many different threats in my ecosystem, the Madagascar rainforest. My collaboration with my partners went very well, for we all completed the tasks on time, and I feel that we communicated very well. Nothing really went wrong in our project except for that we were shocked how hard it was to create a vodcast. In my group, I feel that we were all assertive and spoke equally. We all respected each other's opinion and input. After completing this project, I feel that I should ad to my goals, that I should try to be assertive during every class and the projects I will do this semester in all my classes, and also in the future. I could become more assertive by speaking loudly and clearly stating my opinion. I should also use "I" statements instead of "you" statements.