Sea Otters Ecosystem Research Paper

“Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.”- Peter Benchley; Changes to living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem affect populations within an ecosystem. Life is all connected like a chain which is why there is a food chain. If you take away a piece, it all falls apart.
The biggest and most dangerous living or nonliving part to take out of an ecosystem is a keystone species. The sea otter is a keystone species because of how many different parts of its ecosystem it affects. One part of the sea otters ecosystem that it affects is the kelp forests in the water. The sea otter and the kelp forests have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship because with the otters eating the sea urchins, the kelp forests stay healthy and provide a home for the otters. This relationship also helps ecosystems above the water because the kelp forests absorb vast amounts of CO2 in the air. One benefit of removing the sea otter from its ecosystem is the crab population would grow and they eat algae which produces large amounts of toxins that get released into the water. …show more content…
In the podcast “listening to Nature” they talked about how some noises could dramatically affect an ecosystem by startling hiding prey or by hiding others. A specific example they used was when an airplane passes by a group of frogs it silences their croaking which makes it easier for predators to track them. In that example a nonliving part of our ecosystem passed by their ecosystem and affected the frogs and their predators. This is not a symbiotic relationship because the only one that is helped it the predator but it is helped by something non