Ecology is the study of the relationships among organisms and their surroundings. Discuss

  Q. Ecology is the study of the relationships among organisms and their surroundings. Discuss

Answer

These surroundings are called the environment of the organism.

Concepts in Ecology:

The term “ecology” was coined by combining two Greek words, oikos (house or dwelling place), and Logos (the study of), to denote the relationship between organisms and their environment. Ecology is a multidisciplinary enterprise, which cannot be made to fit into one channel of scientific inquiry: it ranges from reductionism in the study of individual species populations, through less reductionist approaches in the study of communities, to the holistic in the studies of the totality of communities on earth.

The basic concepts of ecology include the following:

i. All living organisms and the environment they live in are mutually reactive, affecting each other in various ways.

ii. Environment plays a major role in the critical stages of the life cycle of the species.

iii. The species reacts to the environmental changes and adjusts itself structurally and physiologically.

iv. The environment also changes according to certain species- specific activities like growth, dispersal, reproduction, death, decay, etc.

v. All plants and animals are related to each other by their co-action and reaction on the environment.

vi. Under similar climatic conditions, there may simultaneously develop more than one community, some reaching the climax stage, and others under different stages of succession.

Ecosystem Ecology:

A group of individual organisms of the same species in a given area is called a population. While, a group of populations of different species in a given area is called a community. And, an ecosystem or an ecological system is the whole biotic community in a given area and its abiotic environment. It therefore includes the physical and chemical nature of the sediments, water and gases as well as all the organisms.

An ecosystem can be any size, from an area as small as a pinhead to the whole biosphere. The term was first used in the 1930s to describe the interdependence of organisms among themselves and with the living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) environment. At ecosystem level, the units of study are comparatively very large and there are no practical units, if the nature is conceived as a single, giant ecosystem.

Social sciences have borrowed the concept of ecology from biology. As a branch of biology, ecology is the study of the relationship between living beings and their environment. Sociology has been greatly influenced by biology. Sociology also studies the relationship between man and environment through ecology. Field of study of human ecology in sociology is centered around man and his environment.