Okay, so for reconciliation ecology i have “a science focused on inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, or play” but how would that work? How does one “invent” a new habitat for a species? I just can’t seem to think of an example that would help me understand how this would work, so if anyone has any clarifying comments that would be great!
Okay, so looking over my old tests there was a question that asked what the biotic potential of a population was and the answer was “the maximum reproductive rate of a population,” so does that mean r=biotic potential? I always thought that biotic potential was kind of like K, carrying capacity. Also, if it isn’t r then what is it?? If someone could help me out that would be awesome…
Question #9 on Study Guide 6 asks what three factors are typically used to describe different populations, and I have the five factors that can be used but I just wasn’t sure which three were the most commonly used?
Okay, so I was reading Supplement 10 where it talks about upwelling and what I’m not clear on is the exact causes of upwelling. The book said it was due to winds and the movement of surface water but I feel like those would have to be some pretty strong winds to be able to mix even the deepest layers of ocean water…can anyone set me straight?
Okay, so Kevin’s post made me look through the diagrams in our book again, and I have a question on the phosphorus cycle. In the diagram, it has phosphates from sewage, mining waste, and fertilizer running off into a lake, but then there are no arrows connecting the lake to the rest of the cycle. Do those phosphates become sediments at the bottom of the lake, or do they join the cycle again through the terrestrial food web (biosphere)? The book’s diagram was just a bit confusing…
So I was looking over the study guide and part of question #9 I’m a little fuzzy on. I have written down that one of the five basic causes of env. problems is “Trying to Manage Nature without Knowing Enough About It.” Off the top of my head I can’t come up with a situation where that would be the case, and also how would we go about solving this problem? By simply learning more about nature?? Maybe it’s just the wording but this confused me a little bit…
APES Class–August 28
Today our APES class went “fishing” in the lab. Instead of actual fish, though, our prey was a collection of Goldfish snacks on a paper plate “lake,” our “poles” were straws, and our “boat” was a plastic cup. The situation was that everyone in his/her group was the head of a family that was on the verge of starvation; the only source of food to feed these families with was the lake which was shared with three other group mates. The lake had a carrying capacity (definition- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/carrying+capacity) of sixteen fish. Each family needed two fish per year (every minute, or round, represented a year) to subsist.
The rules were:
-no communicating with group members
-no fishing by hand (must use your pole)
-each person gets one turn to fish per year and each year the person who fishes first must rotate
-any fish taken beyond the two necessary for subsistence could be sold for profits (in this case mints)
-the fish left in the lake could reproduce (double) after the end of each round.
It only took three years for two of the three groups to completely wipe out the fish population in our lakes. In these two groups, the reason for this was that people decided to make a profit and took more than just two fish the first year. This led to a degradation of the resource that ended up leaving the lake empty after three years. Even if just one person decided to make a profit only for the first year, the lake would still be fish-less after four years. Just do the math…Year One: 16 – (2 x 4) – 1 = 7 x 2 = 14 à Year Two: 14 – (2 x 4) = 6 x 2 = 12 à Year Three: 12 – (2 x 4) = 4 x 2 = 8 à Year Four: 8 – (2 x 4) = 0! The group that did manage to have fish left after the third year had only taken two fish per person, subsisting without making any profit; had they continued this, they could have lived off of the fish in their lake indefinitely without ever depleting their resource.
What happened to the other two groups is called the “tragedy of the commons.” Garrett Hardin first proposed this in 1968 and basically said that when there is a common area for public use, each person will try to use it to their own benefit and the result will be an exploitation of that common area that is usually very detrimental (Hardin’s essay- http://dieoff.org/page95.htm). This idea was best represented by Ursula during the second game (during which everyone could talk) when she caught all the fish for herself and let her group mates starve; as she put it, “The rules didn’t say I had to be nice to my neighbors.” Hardin also proposed some solutions to the tragedy of the commons that we talked about in class, such as privatizing the commons so that it can’t be exploited by everyone. There’s also the option of keeping common areas publicly owned but restricting them, such as hunting and fishing licenses and quotas regulated by the government. Whatever the best solution is, the point of the lab and of Hardin’s essay is that we cannot simply ignore this tragedy of the commons, and should always be conscious of the strain that we put on shared resources.
