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Never Cry Wolf Ecology

Decent Essays

Ecology is a vast study of living things and how they interact. By gathering ideas from Chapter 13, Chapter 14, and Chapter 16 we learned many things about ecology. To tie these things all together, we watched the movie “Never Cry Wolf”. This movie showed us that in every type of environment there are connections that are more human than we know. The main character, Tyler, is sent on a mission in the Arctic to study wolves and see if they are responsible for the population decrease of caribou. He meets Rosie, a man who flies him out into the wilderness on his plane. Rosie is very careless and spontaneous with his actions. The wolves that Tyler studies are named George and Angelica and their children. You can’t forget Uncle Albert too! Along …show more content…

First of all, Tyler in the movie studied the relationships between the wolves and caribou just like the ecologists our textbook talked about studying relationships. Second, Tyler used the biotic and abiotic factors to study the wolves’ behavior. The temperature and food conditions could affect the decline in caribou. Also, the keystone species was the caribou so, if you remove all caribou that land wouldn’t be sustainable. Another key way the movie relates is the topic of food webs. Wolves eat anything they can find; from the mice to the caribou. Lastly, the cycles of resources. The water cycle has a strong impact on the wolves because if there are too many clouds the wolves will get too cold and will lose their food because of the food …show more content…

One being, habitat and niche. The wolves habitat was the arctic and one of its’ niches was that it hunts in a pack. Another niche is that they only have a few cubs like George and Angelica had 2 cubs. Secondly, competition and predation. The text says that every ecosystem has this trait and the movie definitely supports that. In the movie there was competition over food and the predation of the caribou. Third, population density and dispersion. The different packs of wolves moved all around and were dispersed and not very dense at all. Though, the caribou were very dense and traveled all together not just a few in one pack. Fourth, population growth. Like previously mentioned, wolves only have a few cubs so the population growth stays mostly the same. Lastly, the ecological succession. This happened more with the caribou than the wolves because of their decline in population from the wolves. Lastly, in Chapter 16 there were many points about human impact on ecosystems. In “Never Cry Wolf”, the human impact wasn’t huge, but it existed. Ootek implied that killing a wolf is worth a lot of money. Chapter 16 focused on water quality too, which can relate to the movie. If the wolves, or Tyler for that matter, didn’t have clean water they wouldn’t be able to survive. There are not many people in the Arctic, so there isn’t much pollution. The ecological footprint of the wolves was small because they don’t have trash

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