BIO 123 —Biodiversity

Final exam

Life on land (a general theme)

1. Compare and contrast the opportunities, challenges, and adaptations faced by green plants, fungi, arthropods, and vertebrates in the transition to life on land.

What characteristics define and distinguish animals?

1. What are the three layers of triploblastic animals?
2. Why are bilateral symmetry and cephalization related?
3. What is an example of a diploblastic animal? Does it have radial or bilateral symmetry?
4. How are cephalopods similar to other molluscs? How are they different?
5. What is the primary difference between protostomes and deuterostomes?
6. Why is segmentation important in animals? Name two groups that developed segmentation independently.
7. What is a hydrostatic skeleton? Why is it important?

Why have some animal groups been more successful than others?

1. Why is segmentation important to arthropods?
2. Why is an exoskeleton important to arthropods?
3. Why are limbs important to arthropods?
4. What are three possible components of an arthropod exoskeleton?
5. Where do arthropod jaws come from?
6. How do terrestrial arthropods keep from drying out?
7. How do insects breathe?
8. What are the three major segments of an insect body? To which segment are the walking legs attached?
9. Distinguish hemimetabolous and holometabolous insects and give an example of each.
10. Why is flight such an important adaptation among insects? What are some other animal groups that developed flight?
11. Why do insects dominate the land?

Where do vertebrates fit in?

1. What are some close relatives of the vertebrates?
2. What is a notochord and why is it important?
3. What were the first vertebrate skeletons made of?
4. What is ossification and why is it important?
5. Where do vertebrate jaws come from?
6. Where do tetrapod limbs come from?
7. How do the amniotes keep from drying out?
8. What are some reasons that mammals and dinosaurs (including birds) have been so successful?

Why bother with cells?

(Waiting for questions from Dr. Pal.)

Why do similar climates result in similar communities?

1. In which biome is Cal Poly Pomona located?
2. What is it about biomes that is important. What is unimportant?
3. What do we mean when we talk about convergent evolution of communities?
4. What is the significance of seasonality in rainfall?
5. What is the significance of seasonality in temperature? In the tropics, which is more variable, daily temperature or yearly temperature?
6. Compare and contrast arctic tundra and tropical tundra. What is the pattern we see in tree lines as we move from the pole to the equator?
7. What are some of the climatic factors that make the vegetation of Cal Poly Pomona more similar to the vegetation of southern France than it is to the vegetation of coastal Oregon? The California bay tree (or Oregon myrtle, Umbellularia californica) occurs at Cal Poly and in coastal Oregon. How do you explain that?
8. What are the two contrasting views about the nature of ecological communities?
9. What is a climax community?

Why are some habitats more diverse than others?

1. What are the effects of habitat fragmentation?
2. Does increasing area increase or decrease species diversity?
3. Does increasing latitude (away from the equator) increase or decrease species diversity?
4. What is a “wildlife corridor” and why is it important?
5. What is the difference between resistance and resilience in a community?
6. What are some of the ways that communities respond to fire?
7. What are keystone species, and how do they affect species diversity?

Why do we run the universities?

1. What is an ecotone? What kinds of ecotones do humans characteristically favor?
2. What types of biological communities do the other great apes inhabit?
3. What does “humans are niche thieves” mean?
4. What evidence supports the statement that humans are a disturbance species?
5. What are some of the reasons that bipedalism may have been important in the evolution of humans?
6. Other than the ability to learn, what is another biological requirement for having a university?

Why does biodiversity matter?

1. What is comparative biology?
2. What are two factors that make humans better students of biodiversity than any other species?
3. Why are overpopulation and overuse of resources favored by natural selection in most species?
4. What are some benefits that humans receive from a biologically diverse world?
5. Why is the study of biodiversity important to the science of biology?
6. Why is the study of biodiversity important to human survival?

Second midterm

Multicellularity comparison chart (thanks to Dr. Hartney for taking notes)

1. Why do euglenas ignore red light?
2. What changing environmental condition causes the red tide?
3. The cells of unicellular organisms are less specialized than those of multicellular organisms. Why?
4. How can euglenas (and some diniflagellates) continue to live in the absence of light or chloroplasts?
5. What is the one feature most responsible for the differences between animals and sponges on the one hand, and plants, kelps, red algae, and fungi on the other?
6. Which has greater specialization of its different cells and tissues, animals or sponges? Kelps or red algae?
7. What is the effect of increasing complexity of a multicellular organism on its likelihood of reproducing clonally?
8. Is the similarity between kelps and plants due to homology or homoplasy? How do we know?
9. "Stramenopile" means "fuzzy flagellum". Why are they called that?
10. What is the main cell wall constituent of diatoms?
11. Why don't kelps have xylem?
12. Which was more important for the spread of potato blight in Europe, clonal or sexual reproduction?
13. What are the three main challenges that plants faced as they evolved to occupy the land?
14. What is the distinguishing feature of vascular plants? What is the key innovation that made it possible?
15. Are the large land plants we see growing around us mainly gametophytes or sporophytes?
16. In what kind of habitat do the closest relatives of the land plants live?
17. What was the one challenge of living on land that most affected the fungi?
18. What is a dikaryotic cell?
19. How do fungi eat? What do they eat? (Use the words "saprophyte" and "parasite" in your answer.)
20. You are looking at a wild mushroom. What is the function of that part of the organism? The organism is much larger; where does the rest of it grow?

First midterm

1. What are homology and homoplasy?
2. What is a homology shared by all living organisms on earth?
3. What is phylogeny?
4. Describe how homologies are used for reconstructing phylogeny.
5. Distinguish between monophyletic and paraphyletic groups.
6. What do hierarchies have to do with trees?
7. What was the contribution of Carl Linnaeus to biology?
8. What are the seven required categories or levels in modern biological classification?
9. Distinguish between natural classifications and artificial classifications.
10. Species A and species B are in the same genus. Species C is in another family. What is a conclusion we could draw from this?
11. What are the functions of mitochondria and chloroplasts?
12. What unique feature do all eukaryotes share?
13. What is one kind of evidence that led Dr. Margulis to believe that mitochondria and chloroplasts were once free-living prokaryotes?
14. Endosymbiosis of mitochondria probably started out as parasitism and endosymbiosis of chloroplasts probably started out as predation. Both became mutualisms. Why might this be an advantage, to both the eukaryote and the prokaryote?
15. Which came first, mitochondria or chloroplasts? How do we know?
16. Distinguish between primary endosymbiosis and secondary endosymbiosis.
17. What are the three basic types of chloroplasts?
18. Why is RuBisCO important?
19. How do genes from the mitochondria and chloroplasts end up in the nucleus? Why is that an advantage to the eukaryotic host cell?
20. Name one thing that microtubules do.