Everglades Capstone Project

1) List the producer(s) in your food web.

The producer in my diagram is the Butterfly orchid.

2) List the herbivores in your food web.

The herbivores are the mosquito and the Eastern mud turtle.

3) Are there any organisms in your food web that are omnivores? On which trophic levels are they feeding?

The grass carp on the secondary level would be considered an omnivore because it eats fish, plants and mosquitoes.

4) List the carnivores in your food web.

Blue Heron, American Alligator, and the Raccoon.

5) Identify and list a food chain within your food web that depicts at least three trophic levels. What organism in your selected food chain is a secondary consumer?

The grass carp eats the butterfly orchid, and then the alligator eats the grass carp. The secondary consumer would be the alligator in this case.

6) Are there any nonnative species in your food web? Briefly describe are they altering this food web in the Everglades ecosystem?

The blue heron could be considered non native because they were originally from the caribbean and the galapagos islands, but migrated to Florida.

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7) Choose a primary consumer in your food web. If its population suddenly started to decline, what density-dependent (biotic) factors could be causing it?

If the grass carp population started to decline, it would be because the alligators and the blue heron were eating too many to keep the population balanced, and the alligators were not eating enough blue heron and too much grass carp.

8) Choose a secondary consumer in your food web. If its population suddenly started to increase, what density-dependent (biotic) factors could be causing it?

The reason that the population of the blue heron or the raccoon was decreasing, because the alligator was eating too many land mammals and a low amount of fidh and other primary consumers.

9) Are there any keystone species in your food web? If a keystone species were removed from your food web, how would its loss impact the other organisms?

The butterfly orchid would for sure be a keystone species in the diagram, because the plant is the only thing the turtle and grass carp eat.

10) Are there any endangered or threatened species in your food web? If the species goes extinct, how would its loss impact the other organisms?

The American alligator is endangered right now, and if it was to go extinct, the blue heron and the raccoon would take over eating and decreasing the mud turtle, grass carp, and the southern leopard frogs population drastically, which would then cause an increase in mosquitoes and butterfly orchids. Which would not be a good thing because mosquitoes tend to carry deadly diseases.