SimBio Lab 6: Nutrient Pollution
Overview
This lab introduces you to the concepts of eutrophication, nutrient limitation, simple food chains, ecosystem ecology and biomagnification. It also demonstrates one of the main causes behind fish kills. In this simulation of a simplified model of a temperate lake you will follow and describe changes in populations of phytoplankton, zooplankton and trout as various parameters are changed.
Learning Objectives
Predict how increasing the availability of a limiting nutrient will impact organisms that directly use that nutrient.
Conduct and interpret simple experiments to determine if a given nutrient is limiting a particular population of phytoplankton.
Predict how the effects of nutrient pollution will be indirectly modified by adding or removing higher trophic levels.
Predict how concentrations of a biomagnifying molecule in a population will qualitatively change over time, depending on the population’s trophic level.
Determine whether a toxin biomagnifies, based on a graph showing its average concentration in the tissue of organisms at different trophic levels.
Interpret graphical data from an experiment with a single quantitative independent variable.
Submission Instructions:
Go to https://www.simutext.com/student/ and log in with your username and password that you created earlier.
Begin the simulation and answer questions.
Complete SimBio Lab 6: Nutrient Pollution by due date – see Syllabus Page 2.
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