BIO120H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Detritivore, Herbivore, Lignin
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BIO120H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Organisms came up with defensive mechanisms to not be eaten to boost up their fitness. Trophic levels based on the function in the trophic flow in the whole community. Tertiary consumers = carnivores who eat secondary consumers. Trophic connections among species can be analyzed as interaction webs with network properties like connectance". If we have a lot of organisms who eat each other we get a food web. Trophic relations can determine community structure in ways that can be investigated by removal experiments. Think of tomato experiment from the lab: control group and insecticide treatment. Hairston, smith & slobodkin, 1960: trophic cascades (hss) Proposition: by just looking at the world we can understand how tropic levels are connected. The world is green: plants are not being limited by herbivores, because of the indirect effect of carnivores eat the herbivores, thus, not controlled by food supply, but by predation.
