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Tropical ecology is the study of the relationships between the biotic and abiotic components of the tropics, or the area of the Earth that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn (23.4378° N and 23.4378° S, respectively). The tropical climate experiences hot, humid weather and rainfall year-round.
The term tropic is from Ancient Greek τροπικός (tropikós), in the sense "of or pertaining to a turn or change", meaning "causing a change, affecting"; this is the same origin as tropic and trope. This should not be confused with trophic, as in similar-sounding trophic hormone – the words and concepts are both unrelated. [3]
In biology, a tropism is a phenomenon indicating the growth or turning movement of an organism, usually a plant, in response to an environmental stimulus. [1] In tropisms, this response is dependent on the direction of the stimulus (as opposed to nastic movements, which are non-directional responses).
The Tropic of Cancer is the Northernmost latitude from which the Sun can ever be seen directly overhead, and the Tropic of Capricorn is the Southernmost. [8] This means that the tropical zone includes everywhere on Earth which is a subsolar point at least once during the solar year. Thus the maximum latitudes of the tropics have equal distances ...
Examples of species include caecilians, modern sirenians and the plant genera Acacia and Bacopa. [ 2 ] Neotropical is a zoogeographic term that covers a large part of the Americas , roughly from Mexico and the Caribbean southwards (including cold regions in southernmost South America).
For example, assume 500 units of energy are produced by trophic level 1. One half of that is lost to non-predatory death, while the other half (250 units) is ingested by trophic level 2. One half of the amount ingested is expelled through defecation, leaving the other half (125 units) to be assimilated by the organism. Finally one half of the ...
The mean chain length of an entire web is the arithmetic average of the lengths of all chains in a food web. [42] [14] In a simple predator-prey example, a deer is one step removed from the plants it eats (chain length = 1) and a wolf that eats the deer is two steps removed from the plants (chain length = 2).
The trophic level of a species may vary if it has a choice of diet. Virtually all plants and phytoplankton are purely phototrophic and are at exactly level 1.0. Many worms are at around 2.1; insects 2.2; jellyfish 3.0; birds 3.6. [9] A 2013 study estimates the average trophic level of human beings at 2.21, similar to pigs or anchovies. [10]