BIOA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Primary Production, Water Cycle, Bioluminescence

• School: UTSC
• Department: Biological Sciences
• Course: BIOA02H3
• Professor: Stephen Reid

Document Summary

Define and explain the significance of all red terms: aquatic biomes are distributed by these main factors: Climate: you would expect to find variation of species depending on the climate conditions in different aquatic ecosystems. Nutrient and oxygen availability: in open air, o2 is not considered a resource as it is pretty much infinite, however, o2 is much more limited in aquatic ecosystems and low concentration of o2 will affect many organisms. Therefore, many deep-sea organisms rely on the photosynthetic activity of other organisms (which are typically found above them) for o2. Sunlight availability: in photic zones sunlight is able to penetrate through and organisms within this area can photosynthesize (plants) and can navigate freely without any other specialization. However, in aphotic zones sunlight does not reach these depths and as a result organism do not receive light for photosynthetic activity.