BIO120H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Insecticide, Herbivore, Lignin
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BIO120H1 Full Course Notes
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Primary producers: plants, fix carbon, drive life processes of everyone else. Most carnivores don"t really care about what other kinds of animals they eat, fairly generalist. Food webs: chart showing who eats whom, where energy flow goes. Trophic connections among species can be analyzed as interaction webs with network properties like connectance . People are very concerned with this, but in ecology it isn"t very worthwhile, data aren"t very good. More importantly, trophic relationships can determine community structure in ways that can be investigated by removal experiments. How particular interactions structure ecological communities through biotic interactions. One side of a field: control treatment, beetles abundant, high plant diversity. Other side: insecticide treatment, goldenrod beetles suppressed, low plant diversity. Main difference: yellow plants growing on insecticide side. Main insect player: beetle that specialized on goldenrod. When you leave the beetle, get diverse community of a lot of other plants.
