Crash Course: Ecology
With a solid understanding of biology, it’s time to look at the big picture—how living things interact and affect each other and their environment.
Life is powerful, and to understand how living systems work, it is first necessary to understand how they have formed, evolved and diversified over the past 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history.
Population ecology is the study of the predominantly interacting groups within a species and how they live together in a geographic area to understand why these populations differ from another at one time and place. How does this work for anyone?
If life on Earth were a race, humans would undoubtedly win the race. We’re like Michael Phelps in real life, but with 250,000 times as many gold medals.
Interactions between species define ecological communities, and community ecology studies these interactions wherever they occur. Although the interaction between species is mainly competition, competition is quite dangerous, so many interactions actually bypass direct competition, but find ways to share resources and make species get along well.
