Term 3 Blog Post 3: Interactions & Cycles

Introduction :

In this blog post, I will be talking about the issues and things we learnt in class, and the theme for term 1 was - Interactions, as well as Cycles. Basically, we were introduced to Ecology, and what the Nutrient Cycle was. It was almost a revisit to what we had learnt during Primary School, which helped us a lot as most of the content had to be learnt through memory work and self-study, so a little bit of background knowledge actually made a huge difference. My ACE project group also did a PowerPoint Presentation regarding Ecology, which helped us gained a better and deeper understanding before we officially covered the topic in class.

Ecology

Simple concepts of population, community and ecosystem

Basically we learnt many new terms such as 'population' and 'community' and 'habitat'. We also had to be able to identify a habitat and some of the organisms associated with the habitat. This was pretty much what we learnt in Primary School, and is also where the tedious 'memorising stage' is. I would guess that many of us spent quite some time trying to make sure we had the sufficient content in our heads before we headed off to any examination.

Covering things that were not during Primary School included learning the importance of various physical factors like air, water, temperature, light, minerals and acidity/alkalinity, in regards to the life of the organisms. Now that was a mouthful, and I found it hard to try to form any kind of acronym to help remember all those factors!

We also had to remember the many reasons of the importance of conserving the physical environment. I paid particular attention to this one, seeing as to how the practice assignments had a question that weighed 6 marks, asking us the exact same thing that appeared on our notes.

Relationships of Organisms with One Another and with the Environment

This one was a little more interesting for me(and perhaps my ACE project group too), as we had done more research on this area during our presentation(for the fun of it). This was because out of what we learnt for the interactions between organisms; Mutualism, Commensalism, Parasitism, Herbivory, Predation and Competition, we found particular interest in 'Parasitism'. Just a quick gist of what we found:

Tongue-eating parasite:

Cute little fellow isn't he? There were also many other interesting things that we found regarding parasites.

Now going back to the topic, we also needed to be able to establish the relationships in a food web, such as the producer, consumer, herbivore, carnivore, decomposer and the food chain. The Sun of course, is the principal source of energy input to biological systems.

There were also other areas that were not covered in class but in the notes; pyramids of numbers and biomass, as well as energy losses between trophic levels.

Nutrient Cycles

Nutrient Cycles in the Ecosystem

For the theme 'Cycles', there wasn't really much being taught in class, and the notes we were given were also minimal. Most of my class thought that this would not be tested on much during the examinations, and decided to skip/skim through this part of the notes. I on the other hand was not prepared to take any chances, and also made sure I knew the content very well.

So what we basically learnt here was the Carbon Cycle and its importance, which is really to help maintain a balance in the ecosystem. I also understood from linking to what I learnt in Ecology that nutrients trapped in living organisms are recycled with the help of decomposers.

There you have it! This post might seem a little short as compared to the others in my E-Portfolio, but most of the things we learnt this term were details that had to be memorised!