Of Individual Organisms Flashcards
7 cards from real Ecology practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Of Individual Organisms flashcards as text
What is the primary ecological significance of countercurrent heat exchange in the flippers of marine mammals?
Answer: It conserves body heat by warming cold venous blood returning from the extremity
Arteries and veins run adjacent in flipper tissues, allowing warm arterial blood to transfer heat to cool venous blood before it returns to the core, minimizing heat loss.
An organism that is an osmoconformer in a marine environment means it:
Answer: Allows its internal osmolarity to match that of the surrounding seawater
Osmoconformers passively equilibrate their body fluid osmolarity with the surrounding medium, avoiding the energy cost of active ion regulation.
Which component of an individual's life history represents the trade-off between current reproduction and future survival?
Answer: Cost of reproduction
The cost of reproduction describes how current reproductive effort reduces an organism's future survival probability and reproductive capacity.
Desert plants such as cacti store water in succulent tissues. This is an example of which category of adaptation?
Answer: Morphological adaptation
Succulent tissue is a structural (morphological) feature that visibly changes the form of the organism to suit its arid environment.
In terms of individual ecology, what does 'scope for growth' measure?
Answer: Energy available after maintenance costs are paid, allocatable to growth and reproduction
Scope for growth is the energy remaining from assimilation after standard metabolic costs are subtracted, representing what is available for production.
Which of the following describes the zone of physiological stress in a tolerance curve?
Answer: The suboptimal zones near the limits of tolerance where survival is possible but stressed
In a tolerance curve, zones of physiological stress flank the optimum, where organisms survive but at reduced performance due to near-limit conditions.
Which mechanism allows some freeze-tolerant frogs to survive ice formation in their body tissues?
Answer: Accumulation of cryoprotectants like glucose that protect cells from ice damage
Freeze-tolerant frogs such as the wood frog mobilize massive amounts of glucose from glycogen, which enters cells and prevents lethal dehydration during freezing.