Quiz

Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each, based on the provided source material.

1. What is biological productivity, and what role do primary producers play in this process within an aquatic ecosystem?
2. Describe the “standing crop” method for measuring productivity and identify one of its major limitations.
3. How can measuring the uptake of inorganic nutrients provide an indirect measurement of primary productivity?
4. Explain the basic principle of using dissolved oxygen fluctuations to measure productivity. What key piece of information does this method provide that the ¹⁴C method does not?
5. What is the “light and dark bottle method” and what do the different bottles measure?
6. Identify the primary advantage of the radioactive carbon (¹⁴C) method over oxygen-based methods, and describe one of its significant technical challenges.
7. What is the “trophic-dynamic model,” and what concept did it introduce to the study of ecosystems?
8. In the context of phytoplankton communities, what is meant by the energy cost of “information”? How does this concept potentially explain disproportionate increases in zooplankton and fish populations?
9. Define eutrophication and list the idealized stages of lake succession from lowest to highest productivity, including the final stage.
10. Compare the key characteristics of an ultraoligotrophic lake, like Lake Vanda, with an extremely eutrophic lake, like Clear Lake.

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