An ecosystem is a geographic area where living organisms, weather, and landscape interact, including biotic and abiotic components. It encompasses food chains involving producers, consumers (herbivores, carnivores, omnivores), scavengers, and decomposers, each playing essential roles in energy flow and recycling nutrients. Additionally, relationships such as symbiosis and predation influence the dynamics and health of the ecosystem.

2. WHAT ISAN ECOSYSTEM?
An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants,
animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and
landscape, work together to form a bubble of life.
Ecosystems contain biotic or living, parts, as well as
abiotic factors, or nonliving parts.

11. In predation, one organism kills and consumes another. Predation
provides energy to prolong the life and promote the reproduction of
the organism that does the killing, the predator, to the detriment of
the organism being consumed, the prey. Predation influences
organisms at two ecological levels.

12. Scavengers play an important role the food web. They keep an
ecosystem free of the bodies of dead animals, or carrion.
Scavengers break down this organic material and recycle it into the
ecosystem as nutrients. They use these keen senses to locate
rotting carrion while they are soaring high over land.

13. A producer in an ecosystem is the baseline part of a food chain. Producers
include plants, bacteria, algae and phytoplankton. Organisms that eat
producers are called consumers, and organisms that consume dead organisms
are called decomposers. They all participate in the complex web of an
ecosystem.

14. Living things that have to hunt, gather and eat their food are called
consumers. Consumers have to eat to gain energy or they will die.
There are four types of consumers: omnivores, carnivores, herbivores
and decomposers. Herbivores are living things that only eat plants to
get the food and energy they need.

15. Carnivores will feed on herbivores, omnivores, and other carnivores in an
ecosystem. A natural community depends on the presence of carnivores to
control the populations of other animals. Large carnivores include wolves and
mountain lions. A large carnivore might hunt down large herbivores such as elk
and deer.

16. Herbivores play an important role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem by
preventing an overgrowth of vegetation. Additionally, many plants rely
on herbivores such as bees to help them reproduce. By the same token,
herbivores rely on plants not just for food but also for habitats and
shelter.

17. Omnivores are a diverse group of animals. Examples of omnivores include bears, birds,
dogs, raccoons, foxes, certain insects, and even humans. Animals that hunt other animals
are known as predators, while those that are hunted are known as prey. Since omnivores
hunt and are hunted, they can be both predators and prey.15 Jan 2020

18. Most decomposers are microscopic organisms, including protozoa and bacteria. Other
decomposers are big enough to see without a microscope. They include fungi along
with invertebrate organisms sometimes called detritivores, which include earthworms,
termites, and millipedes.8 Jan 2020

19. Symbiosis is an ecological relationship between two species that live in close proximity
to each other. Organisms in symbiotic relationships have evolved to exploit a unique
niche that another organism provides. Competition and predation are ecological
relationships but are not symbiotic.

20. Parasitism, relationship between two species of plants or animals in which one
benefits at the expense of the other, sometimes without killing the host organism.

21. A series of organisms through which food energy flows in an ecosystem is called a food
chain. It may also be defined as follows. A food chain in an ecosystem is a series of
organisms in which each organism feeds on the one below it in the series.