Unit 7 Reflection

Unit 7 was about ecology, or the "study of house", whose main ideas in biology are, homeostasis, equilibrium, and interdependence. We elaborated on the known fact that environments are in best condition when they are in balance, or in homeostasis by learning about energy interdependence to ensure survival.  There are 6 levels of organization on the earth: organism, population, community, ecosystem, biome, biosphere that live in habitats and have niches. Personally I was confused between these two concepts but as we applied them more in our learning, I understood them better. Making up an ecosystem, are both producers (autotrophs) and consumers (heterotrophs). There are 5 trophic levels, including primary producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, and quaternary consumers. Factors affecting a population's growth are immigration, emigration, births, deaths, disease, predators, limited supply of abiotic factors, and population density and dispersion. All populations reach a carrying capacity (K), which is the maximum population that an environment can support. After a disturbance in an ecosystem a sequence of changes follow, which is called ecological succession. If something remains after the disturbance it is called secondary succession and if nothing remains it is called primary succession. Loss of species has shown to be tightly correlated with human population growth. 4 major threats to species' extinction are: habitat loss, introduced species by humans, overexploitation, and climate change. 
We did many extension activities related to ecology to supplement our learning this unit. First we watched a movie called "Bag It!" which brought light to the issue of plastic's negative impact on the environment. Also we watched a video called "Story of Stuff" which spoke about human waste polluting the planet intensely. Both of these informed us of how careless humans are when it comes to taking care of the earth and set out to motivate people to help the environment. Also, we did a group project on conservation biology, which was really fun and informative. My group made a video which you can watch here. To reflect on our project, we filled out a personal question sheet to see what type of person we are. I got a 13/20 for assertive and passive aggressive, a 14/20 for passive, and a 10/20 for aggressive. This shows that I like to avoid conflict more than anything even though I got pretty close scores for most of the traits.