BIOL 360 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Microbiological Culture, Microbiology, Microbial Ecology
Document Summary
Microbial ecology week 1 & 2 lecture notes. What can ecologists learn from microbes: life beneath a square centimetre of sediment surface. Note: these lecture notes were not written, and should not be used, as a substitute for the lecture. Notes are presented here only as an aid to students who missed lecture, or whose notes may be incomplete in certain particulars. Ecology is the study of organisms and their environments. It asks different questions, and uses different methods, than the study of individual organisms and their internal machinery as is covered in the biol312 microbiology course. Examples: a microbial ecologist might be interested in soil, or the water of a pond or river. What happens to the population if environmental conditions change (e. g. hotter, drier, more acidic, etc. ). Getting the answers to these questions is very difficult. Even the simplest sounding questions, e. g. "what organisms are present?" is not easy to answer.
