Biology Basics

hi everybody and welcome as we begin our journey into the world of biology I want you to take a look at this picture we definitely see things that we consider to be alive in this picture for example we see the tree we know the trees are alive we see grass we know grass are live we see some kind of aquatic grasses here they're a bit longer than the grass that we see over here and those would be alive as well and we also see a body of water and we can probably assume that there are living things in the water as well all of those things that we see are considered macroscopic forms of life they're big enough for us to see with our eyes alone but we also know the other part of the biological universe is the things that we can't see with our naked eyes instead we need special tools in order to see those things and those far outnumber the things that we see macroscopic least there's a lot more little things than there are big things all of those things however are alive and biology is the study of living things or the study of life so what happens if we want to find a pure textbook definition of life well I found one for you and here is what it looks like when I looked it up there's at least 10 different ways to think about life so you would have to go through each one of these and you would have to figure which one sounds the best now for our purposes the first one is going to sound the best to us so it says the state of being which begins with generation birth or germination ends with death also the time during which this state continues that state of an animal or plant in which all or any of its organs are capable of performing all or any of their functions used of all animal and vegetable that's pretty heavy-duty and if you read through the next nine you're going to find that they are no easier to understand in the first one now as good as the first one is as much as it matches our purpose there's some flaws in it and one of the flaws that I see is the fact that it mansions particularly animal or plant so what it's saying is to be alive something must be an animal or a plant and if you look through your biology book you're going to truly find that there are things in your biology book that are alive which would not be considered an animal or plant and we will delve into that this semester so then there's no easy explanation of what exactly life is but life is explained by what living things do so here we see a wheel of pictures all of which show living organisms displaying the characteristics of life and the first thing we can kind of knock out right off the bat here is that living things when we refer to them as whole entities we're going to call them organisms okay no surprises there you've heard this word before and will be referring to it quite often during this class if we take a look at the first picture the one marked number one we can see that it's the center of a flower and that flower is displaying order and organization what that means it's just not a random chaotic mass of living material but instead it's very organized as you can see there you can see that it has a central region here and you see that there are definitely lines of distinction that exist within this center most portion so we have a round nature to the center we have what we call radially symmetrical petals on the edges as well that all seem to be coming off of the central hub region so this is definitely is not a chaotic looking mass of organic chemicals that make up this living thing they are organized very distinctly into unique structures now we could say the same for a human being a human being is not a big bag of goo on the inside there are definite structures that have organization on the inside as well even when we're little children we understand there's hard parts inside of us called bones even though we don't know what the rest is or what it looks like on the inside we know there's these hard structures called bones and we try our best not to break them or little kids so we must understand there's a structure to living things and that these structures themselves are not chaotic either they themselves have more organization inside of them that a lot of people know let's take a look at some systems of the human body so we see the muscular system on the left we see the skeletal system we see the nervous system in the middle we see the endocrine system the fourth picture and we have the circulatory system or cardio bat yeah it is the circulatory system cardiovascular we'd have to see the lungs in there and we don't so the circulatory system is going to contain the vessels in which passed the the fluids of life around inside of a living human being which of course is blood now if we take a closer look at the skeleton picture we can see that this human skeleton is made up of a lot of Bones 206 of them and those Bowman's themselves like I mentioned before they have their own structure as well so if we took a look at the interior of a portion of bone we might see something like this so what we see here is a very organized structure his own system of organization this is called the haversian system or the osteon and you can see that you have little blood vessels inside of each one of these circular cylinders and you also see these concentric layers of rings on the outside you see these little dotted structures on the inside these are little cavities where cells exist and what they do is they can contribute to bone making or bone taking so will either add or remove bone from a given region of bone at any particular moment in time depending on what the body needs at that time we'll talk a lot more about the skeletal system when we learn about the human body later in our class so we never stop seeing patterns of organization within living things now we can even go as simple as a human cell or really any eukaryotic cell and this is what we're going to find on the inside we're going to see what looks like it could be chaos but the fact remains that in every single one of these animal cells we see the same structures over and over and over the three things that are always going to be present is the cell membrane which you can see right here we see the cytoplasmic region right here which contains this soup full of organelles and we see a nucleus here that has a nuclear envelope around it so those key structures are always going to be present in animal cells now things that are also present in animal cells are going to be organelles and this is where you probably remember some of these names from your last class like the Golgi apparatus mitochondria lysosomes endoplasmic reticulum also called ER little protein building factories called ribosomes and even a dark central spot in the nucleus called the nucleolus all of these things are present in every animal cell so this is a system of organization it's a little bit more loosely organized than other structures but we see the same pattern over and over and over which means that it is a structure of organization it is a unit of organization within living things so the cell is then the basic structural and functional unit of all living things so if you look into anything that we consider live alive you'll find one or more than one cell present and you will see sometimes hundreds sometimes thousands sometimes millions and sometimes trillions of cells that work together to form possibly a tissue possibly an organ and organ system or even an organism now they are all produced from pre-existing cells what does that mean well it means that a cell cannot just spontaneously create itself out of nothing hundreds of years ago people believed that things like maggots and little worms could come out of nothing and just spontaneously appear on things like grain and dead organisms they also thought that mice could appear in grain stocks out of nothing so they did all kinds of tests and research and they were able to come to the conclusion they were wrong that it wasn't just coming out of nowhere but instead each of those things from a maggot to Wurm to a mouse they all had cellular origins so there was an experiment that really helped this idea along it was done by Louis Pasteur and we're going to find out more about this experiment later but using a special type of biological apparatus he was able to prove that you cannot just spontaneously generate cells instead it's going to require another cell to go ahead and divide to give you your next set of cells cells are also the smallest units that perform all the vital physiological functions so from our last slide you saw a whole wheel of pictures and a cell can do all of those things because it can perform all the vital physiological functions or characteristics of life now these three statements are actually very special because they are considered cell theory cell theory was originated by the scientists chuan and schleiden and they are a big key part to the understanding of basic biology if we look down below we mentioned these earlier that these are bacteria and we know that every bacterium must come from another you can't have these just come out of nowhere so it's possible that this one here came from that one there it grew to a certain size once it hit that size it's split in two by a process of binary fission to the right of that we have a simple one-celled organism here this is a Paramecium we have a fungus here we have a flower part of the plant kingdom here and here we have an animal organisms can just be one cell so in this case this one here and this one here represent living things that are just one cell big and those are called unicellular organisms or it can be made of many cells such as the case of the fungi the plant and the all Nets what we've called a multicellular organism we are a multicellular organism as well if we look at the levels of organization we can start at a very small level and we can start to see properties emerge as we go up every level for example at the bottom level on the right here I see an atom you guys remember back to high school you have atoms and these atoms when they find the right partners they can change into molecules and molecules do different things chemically than atoms do now if I'm if I happen to put together a few million of the correct molecules I may be able to form a cell either an animal cell or a plant cell and going from these millions of molecules that do not exhibit any of the properties of life if I had the right ones there I can form a life form here and the simplest organism that can exhibit those properties of life that it couldn't as a molecule if I put enough of these cells together of the same type I may be able to form tissues so this here would be an example of nervous tissue the way that these cells are shaped tell me this this comes from the nervous system this particular plant cell here will become part of a leaf and those little dark green things that you've seen their chloroplasts allow it to photosynthesize as we climb up the particular type of tissue and we put enough tissue together we might form organs so in this case we see the brain you can take a look up here it's going to be the brain of an elephant and again this is a craw bigger cross-sectional piece of a leaf and if we put organs together we build a bunch of organs that are connected together we can have an organ system such as the nervous system in this elephant once enough systems are put together you may be able to have an entire organism a multicellular organism which has a lot more properties than just a organ system or an organ because we know that these don't do too well on their own without those other systems being present so each time we move up a rung on this ladder we start to see new emergent properties come out let me catch up with some of the labels for each one I forgot to pop these up we have the atomic level the molecular level the cellular level tissue level organ level organ system level and then finally the organism level now you can see the pictures go further because once you put a number of the same species together you then go from a single solitary organism to population of organisms and once you put a number of populations together different species so here we see zebra here we see those trees here we see elephants we then have what's called a community community that lives and interacts together and those interacting communities can form an ecosystem with the rest of the environmental things that are around it so this would be a much larger area here to qualify as an ecosystem so we take into consideration some of the abiotic factors that exist here as well such as water such as the winds such as the amount of Sun and the soil the rocks that are present and then finally all the living things on the planet are going to interact in the biosphere so we can't separate truly separate one ecosystem from another on a line on a map with a line it's just too difficult there's a lot of blending that goes on and all the things that are alive share this this planet of Earth and make up the biosphere okay so we've touched upon organization we know living things maintain order and they're organized to living things adapt now adapting may mean that something is physically changing or possibly behaviorally changing now what would be the best example the best thing we could do is take a look at an animal and talk about what physical and behavioral adaptations it might it may have so here we have an owl and all has a number of physical adaptations that's going to help it survive all these adaptations are going to make an organism better suited to its environment to survive and pass on its genes to the next generation so the first thing that we could say is that it has talons we can all see that it has these claws come out of its feet here and these are very strong claws in fact they kill most of their prey with those claws alone and the owls are said to have some of the strongest gripping strength of any of the Raptors of any of the birds of prey um it's kind of hard to tell but owls usually have very large eyes and proportion to the rest of their body as well which give them great vision an especially nocturnal vision because they wind up doing most of their hunting at night so inside the eyes we have two types of cells called rods and cones and rods are super sensitive to light and so on owls eyes have a lot more rods a relative to say a human's because we do most of our things diurnal E throughout the day some other adaptations we know that an owl's head can twist around to some severe angles almost 270 degrees in every direction also owls have a special set of feathers here that give it silent flight so these feathers that are found on the wings when I'll flaps them you don't hear the owl so it's very stealthily goes after its prey consider that with a regular bird that flaps its wings and you can hear it coming from feet away so an owl's an ambush hunter so those are all physical adaptations what about behavioural what is this I will do behaviorally that allows it to survive better one of the things that it does it only hunts during the night why would that matter well if you think about the other things that hunt during the day that our Raptors or birds of prey we have things like bald eagles we have things like hawks maybe to decrease the competition amongst these birds it chooses night time because its body is better suited to that and that had to take place over thousands upon thousands of years to have the two of them work harmoniously like that but it was a winning strategy because we know there are elves present at night and we know that there's hawks and eagles that are present hunting throughout the day another thing that these owls will do is they will purge very high on posts and they will watch and they're very keen on sensing moving things out in the field that they're watching once they sense something is moved they'll go ahead and they'll do a particular type of flight pattern where they kind of just soar quietly back and forth over a field looking for that disturbance that they saw so that behavioral adaptation will allow them to be more efficient hunters as well so physically and behaviorally the owl makes a great study for adaptations this forms the far for excuse me this forms the foundation of the understanding of evolution the process by which populations become more suited to their environments over time so as environments change animals also change as well populations will take on new traits that may or may not work towards its benefit Charles Darwin used the phrase natural selection to explain that certain traits allow for an individual to be better suited to its environment and thereby able to pass on its genes to future generations the passing of genes and traits to offspring is referred to as heredity so the best suited individuals to a particular environment are going to survive and live on to reproduce generate that next generation and it will continue to do so until it doesn't have the necessary adaptations to survive if something doesn't have an adaptation the chances for it reaching reproductive age are much lower and successfully producing offspring is much lower than it would be if it had the adaptation so try to think of the phrase differential reproductive success some things successfully reproduce very well some animals and some do not the ones that do will continue their genetic line to the next generation the ones that have very low reproductive success will probably we now over time and will go extinct here we have a scenario of a deer whose favorite food is a particular type of shrub that has leaves that look like these now we're gonna make believe that some mutation happened and it caused the leaves to come out with this kind of spiky unpalatable surface that the deer just does not like to eat because it hurts its tongue when it bites into one of these leaves so what's going to happen here is the deer is going to continue to eat its normal meal which is this non spiky type of leaf here and it's going to try to dodge this one it doesn't want to eat this one very much so upon eating these leaves is also going to eat some of the reproductive structures that wind up budding off of the particulars rub and in doing so it gives the shrub less of a chance to plant seeds in other locations for more of this plant to come out so by the deer eating what it normally does it's decreasing the fecundity of this particular type of shrub so its ability to reproduce successfully so what that means is if it's avoiding this particular spiky leaf the spiky leaf has no problem reproducing in other areas so you're going to start to see more and more spiky leaf plants and meanwhile the number of deer hasn't caught up to the fact that it's losing its food source because now we only have half of the regular shaped leaves available for this particular deer and as we can see he hasn't changed his eating habits at all it's still the smooth smooth smooth edged leaf versus the spiky one and as the number of deer increase and the smooth leaf becomes a limiting resource the couple things are going to have to happen even the deer is going to have to change what he normally eats adapt behaviorally or the other option is die because if it can't eat this particular type of food that it's currently eating it may not have enough nutrition in order to maintain enough calories to survive so here we see almost you know we're talking 80 80 to 90% of its original food source is gone it hasn't yet developed the ability to withstand eating this spiky one so the question is will this deer adapt or die now when we talk about Darwin's view on natural selection we say that some species are selected for and some species are selected against now the question is who is selected for here and who is selected against well as we can see the deer by not changing its food source means that it is going to be selected against in this interaction the pricklyleaf subspecies that came from mutation is selected for in this interaction if the deer move on and over time give this particular plant a chance to grow back and to repopulate that may happen in the deers might be the deer might be fine if they find a new foraging ground however if it doesn't in this maintain the stays is only food possibility it may die umm if that food source runs out so in the case of who is adapting here on the shrub actually adapted by way of a mechanism of a mute so it worked out positively this time for the shrub the third characteristic of life we're going to look at is that organisms respond to their environments and in this situation here we see that a damselfly has been attracted to a Venus flytrap possibly the coloration of the venus flytrap the chemicals that are present drew this damsel fly in for a possible meal and the damselfly happened to trigger a couple of trigger hairs that are present on the Venus flytrap here and here it's struck them with its feet and striking those two trigger hairs at a certain tempo allowed the Venus flytrap to use that as a stimulus to close its jaws on this damselfly and now the Venus flytrap has responded to its environment and now has a meal so it grew this structure because it has to obtain its nitrogen not through the soil because the soil that a Venus flytrap lives in is very poor so it obtains its nitrogen through eating live animals in this case a damselfly so each one responded to its environment and it did so in order to successfully survive that particular environment no responding to the environment is a very very important thing and we do so as well for example just taking a quick peek over here this hiker if the temperature decreasing you're close to home we run back home and we put on new clothing because the environmental conditions have changed so we're gonna respond to that um in this case here we'll say that this hiker wasn't close to home in fact she was very far from home and she was caught without the proper clothing in an area she shouldn't have been in on that particular day so what her body is going to do is going to try to prevent it from dying by using an internal response mechanism her body wants to maintain a steady state it doesn't want to decrease in temperature because if it does she may become hypothermic and that could lead to her demise so what's going to happen is that those cold temperatures are going to reach her skin and they're going to trigger as a stimulus particular nervous cell um stimulations their message are is going to be transferred from the skin from these temperature receptors down these sensory nerve fibers here and it's going to travel all the way up to this person's brain and it's going to reach a particular little tiny structure in the brain called the hypothalamus the hypothalamus is like a thermostat on your house so there's a set point value and if you live in Michigan we know that we have cold winters and we set our thermostat at a certain heat level that we're comfortable with if the temp dips down below that particular temperature what's going to happen is that's going to trigger by way of a stimulus the furnace to kick on and the heats going to blow out until the Omni of room temperature is above that particular temp that you set it at and that will be a trigger to shut it off at that point because we don't want it to run endlessly so what's going to happen is the furnace of our body is going to be a correction signal that's going to go to our muscles and it's going to cause them to start shivering and it's doing that so we build heat and the blood is going to be diverted to our core we're going to start shivering and that's going to generate some heat on the inside maybe enough to get her to somewhere safe again so it's going to try to bring it back to a steady state 37 degrees Celsius or 98.6 degrees and if she cannot maintain that and her body is working too hard and it dips to underneath that 98.6 she may go hypothermic which would be a bad case of worst case scenario for her and we have a name for that we have a name for your body or an animal's body trying to maintain a steady state on the inside and that's called homeostasis we're going to look a lot into this concept this year and the particularly that you see here I'll loop from stimulus um too sensitive to sensing it to integrating the message to an effector that loop is going to be called a feedback loop and this one in particular is called a negative feedback loop because it brings a system back to a steady state now inside our bodies aside from temperature we also have a whole bunch of complex chemistry going on as well and in chemistry we know that we deal with reactants and we deal with products and we have to have a very specific amount of each one if you go over too much bad things can happen if you don't have enough bad things can happen so internally it helps us if we're able to maintain a steady state as well and through a negative feedback loop we can see that happen also so take a look over here and we can see that we have a reactants this might be something you ate we'll call it a and this a food substrate can be changed to B because we know that food leaves us in a different form than when we first suggested it so it's going to go through a number of changes and enzymes are going to provide a lot of those changes that we see in this case enzyme one is going to change a substance a into substance B well substance B is going to be changed substance C by way of enzyme two and substance C is going to change in a substance D by enzyme three so those 3 enzymes are necessary to change our food our nutrition from A to D whatever that may be at a later time but once we have enough D present we have an internal mechanism that allows us to shut down this chain because we don't need anymore product D so once you have an access of D it's going to send a signal to enzyme one to shut down and if enzyme one shuts down that means we're all topped off we don't need anymore of that particular chemical so then a will probably pass through us at that point we also have another system in play called a positive feedback loop which is kind of the opposite it doesn't bring things back to a steady state instead it amplifies a change it makes more habit so in this case here we have a substance W which changes to acts at a later time which changes to Y which changes to Z all of these changes are being helped by enzyme four five and six all of them are on in order for this to happen but in this scenario here when Z is made a large amount of Z doesn't shut it down instead you can see this plus here it's going to cause more of it to happen so what's happening now is that enzyme 5 has been supercharged or maybe more enzymes have been produced to handle more W and eventually change it to Z so in certain scenarios and organisms you may want a positive feedback loop amplifying a particular change what are some examples of that well if you think about childbirth for childbirth once the birthing process has occurred it helps the female body to push out that that offspring that organism with stronger and stronger contractions from the uterus if we're talking about mammalian animals so as the uterus uterine muscles are stretched it's going to stimulate a stronger response a stronger contraction of uterine muscles to expel the baby so in that case positive feedback works very well during particular processes one being childbirth one additional aspect when thinking about living things responding to their environment is the fact that they exchange matter and energy with their immediate environment so whether it's a Venus flytrap exchanging matter with the food that it's caught or this animal here that's enjoying a leafy meal matter will be transferred to the other species and energy will come with that matter when animals release waste that waste can be converted from waste to nutrients for growing plant matter as well this past summer we saw a a flower bloom called the corpse flower this flower is held in a botanical Bart garden in England and the key interesting trait about this flower is that it smells like a dead rotting carcass when it blooms now what evolutionary adaptation would that serve how would this benefit this flower well here's the thing these flowers tend to be solitary there's not many around so when it blooms it's going to need a means to carry its pollen to another plant in order to fertilize it so this one does so by smelling releasing chemicals that smell like a dead carcass which draws in flies of course and the Flies are going to feed on this blooming flower and as they do so they're gaining nutrients but there is also manner being transferred the pollen from this plant is being transferred to the flies which may land on another flower which will work to cross pollinate that other flower so there is a exchange exchange going on between matter and energy by this particular flower by smelling like a corpse and that's where it gets the common name corpse flower another type of Great Lakes example of exchanging matter and energy and respond to the environment um we can look at invasive species called the sea lamprey now the sea lamprey as you can see is not the fish but instead it is this guy right here and what this guy does is he's going to latch on to the fish and he's going to chew a hole through the side of the fish it's going to extract matter which it's going to use for its own energy stores up for as long as possible how does something like that attach to a fish well it's kind of a kind of medieval look in here and pretty brutal but basically there's a suction disc on the front of this animal right here you can clearly see it and it has a number of rows of teeth as well and these teeth are going to help to kind of lock in on the side of the fish's tissue it has what's called a rasping tongue in here which is going to bore a hole into the side of the fish and it's going to extract nutrients from the fish does it hurt the fish of Cour this is a parasite so eventually it's going to weaken this fish so much the fish may die from the wounds that it's going to take on from the lampreys latching on to it now how does a fish like this get into the Great Lakes well this one has almost a 70 to 80 year history of entering the Great Lakes and when it found the whitefish population of the Great Lakes it found a great prey species in order to attach to and then further its own life by doing that particular act of latching on boring a hole and sucking out the nutrients now of course this is problematic because a lot of people were relying on the Great Lakes to be productive and these big large fish could feed a lot of individuals so we had to look into control mechanisms now one thing that we studied was the fact that when these lamprey die they release a chemical which the other lamprey seemed to acknowledge they seemed to sense this death chemical released when lamprey died and they respond to it by getting as far away from it as possible so I want you to think of this scenario well think of a horror movie you're out in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere and you're afraid because you're lost and you start coming upon spikes with skulls on the tops of them and you wander around the more you wander around the more skulls on spikes that you see now as a human you're probably gonna have the fight or flight response kick in you're going to try to get as far away from that threat as possible because you feel like your skull might be the next one on a spike so these lamprey are kind of the same way they're our senses site we see those things we respond their sense is through chemicals in the water they're able to smell these particular deaf chemicals released when a lamprey dies and get out of bed area because they have evolved this particular adaptation to keep them safe so we're going to watch a little clip here on what happens when a lamprey senses this dust death chemical this is a study from Michigan State they were looking at the sea lamprey and they were trying to determine whether there were some control methods that they could put into play to keep the population of sea lamprey down because the higher the population is of this particular cartilaginous fish the more damage they're going to do to our native sport fish that we have here in the Great Lakes region so by looking at a chemical that can cause sea lamprey to move out in the given area it may be possible to trap them in a given area and use a lamprey side or possibly trapping methods to catch the sea lamprey so there's not so many of them swimming around in the Great Lakes region so what we're going to see here is a researcher who's adding this chemical to this tank and you can see at the bottom corner of the tank here a lot of sea lamprey they're just kind of hanging out they're going to put this chemical inside the water and we're going to watch and see what happens so as you can see this is a pretty extreme response to its environment it's sensing that there's death in the area and each individual animal here of course does not want to die it wants to extend its life as long as possible and reproduce as well so in order to do that what we see happening is we see a flight response it's getting it far away from the possibility of being around this death of lamprey as possible some other remarkable types of responding to the environment one is called a walrus haul-out and we're keeping an eye on walrus haul outs because of climate change and as we know as climate changes one of the regions that's affected the most is the polar region and what we're seeing is a dramatic decrease in the ice amount in those polar regions I sit very very important to some of the animals that live in those polar regions such as the walrus so I want you to take a look at this picture here and you can see a couple of masses I'll put my walrus picture up there what this is here we know what this is but what we can see here are thousands upon thousands of walrus that have hauled themselves out of the ocean because there's no sea ice left now females will bear their young on floating ice because it's much safer than their closer to the food and they're safe from being trampled so you can imagine a baby walrus in this situation if there's something that causes a stampede they're likely to get crushed under the weight of stampeding walrus and we're starting to see a decline in their numbers as well as they have to haul out early and young have to be tended to in these massive groups here you see a much lower incidence of survival for the infants very low if the infant has to be born in these conditions here another one that we look at carefully also from the polar region our fact that polar bears have been invading land lately and the reason is because of their ice is also going away in the same manner and they need the ice to properly hunt because their main food is seal and they're able to stealthily hunt the seal by way of the ice but if there's no ice they cannot even come close to catching one in the water and they're at a loss so they come to the land in order to derive nutrition that they're missing and that's what I mean by polar bear invasions now a female polar bear must have enough fat must take in enough calories in order to produce milk and in the case here if she's not receiving that kind of nutrition it will result in a higher infant mortality which basically means that her polar bear cubs starved to death which is very sad avian migrations we use the word avian as we represent birds and for example in Michigan we have a lot of species that do migrate because they can't handle a Michigan winter so they fly south for the summer what we're seeing is that they're returning to Michigan much much earlier and they're leaving much much later so if there's some particular insect that they need throughout the yearly changes they go through um in one place and not the other they may miss that food web if they change their travel schedule if they come if they fly up north earlier and they leave later what if there's a particular type of insect that gives their babies good nutrition but it's no longer there we have to remember that every animal is part of a food web it's an essential piece of a food web and without them being there what happens is they may wind up dying or they're on the insect for some reason being uh being there in two grade of numbers changes the way that that particular food web operates the last example I'll mention is coral reef bleaching and as we know coral reef is usually a beautiful colorful thing full of a huge diversity of animals and what can happen if the environment changes such as a warm swell of water for two to three days is we will see that beautiful coral reef full of color change to that ghost white now this ghost white coral Reef has the ability to stay like this for a very short time two to three days max if the temperature remains high this ghost white coral reef will then turn murky brown and green because it will all die and it will start decomposing but if the cold swell can come back and relieve that heat pressure that it's under it can actually revert back to the colorful productive niche that it once was what we're seeing with the environmental changes that are happening is that we're having a huge amount of species loss greater than anything we've ever seen before there is a natural background extinction rate to animals on this planet but recently we've taken a look at it and we found that it is a thousand times greater now then it's back raid background rate is which means there's something very very different going on in this world around us right now sometimes adaptations can counter rapid change and sometimes not if an animal has an inability to change to that to that environment changing it may die or go extinct so we've covered maintaining order organization adaptations respond to the environment we can also take a look at reproduction we'll look at it much greater in depth later but when we reproduce it we do so to produce offspring so we have two members of the same species come together and the male fertilizes the female in most cases and what we'll see happening is offspring will be produced and that will continue the genetic line of that particular animal we can also see development over time so development depends on the organism as far as you know how much you want to look into development some go through a number of stages think of frog think of the stages that a frog has to go through from egg to tadpole to juvenile and then to adult think of an insect in starters that it has to go through from a lot from an egg to a larva to mature insect so if we look at a single-cell organism you might not see too much but what you will see is a gain in size possibly a difference in the chemistry of that particular organism from just being made to you know in its last stages the chemistry might change little so there is development sometimes a lot sometimes it's a little acquiring energy utilization and process what that means is that animals must eat they have to do something to regenerate their stores of ATP and have enough energy to go through and perform those characteristics of life that you see on this wheel and lastly number seven which is actually pretty closely related to responding to the environment here these two there's a direct link there we have an internal steady state with our metabolism and we must be able to maintain that steady state in order to remain healthy from everything from blood pH to temperature to a number of specific ions present in our blood plasma all that's very important so we must maintain our homeostasis now so can we look at anything and determine whether or not it is a alive or not whether it's a living organism sure we could take a look at a rock for example if I had a rock does a rock and maintain organization in order sure does it adapt not really does it respond to its environment nope reproduce now develop no acquire energy not usually and maintain homeostasis not really but kinda sorta so rock wouldn't be good what about fire fire is interesting because fire has a number of things that it might be able to do does it adapt to a situation maybe it may have windy conditions or very still conditions so it has to adapt in the way it burns does it respond to its environment a little bit does it reproduce it can if a spark jumps off from the fire and lands on something else that's flammable does it develop yeah does it acquire energy sure as it burns doesn't maintain homeostasis has a hard time doing that it is not very good at it and the key one that is missing although it worked for like two through six seven and one maintaining order and organization a definite no for fire so that one would not work but then we could take a look at anything else and we'll see if all seven of these come into play with it's oh the way it exists and if it doesn't then we can't go ahead and call it something that's a lie another thing that we do find with things that are alive is they contain carbon carbon is the chemical that we use to label something as organic and things that are alive are organic can we organize living things well we definitely try we use a branch of biology called taxonomy to put organisms into groups and categories and there's eight major taxa that organisms are classified into and they go like this domain kingdom phylum class order family genus species how do you remember those in order well there's gnomonic devices out there to help you with that I would suggest googling one I'll give you one in class and I'm sure you can find something to your liking that will help you remember the order of those now the domain is the largest category that we see in taxonomy and the smallest category is species so domains the biggest and species is the smallest so domains have tons and tons of organisms inside of them species only have one every species we have not only does it have labels that go in each one of these particular taxa but if we're naming an organism we tend to use just two parts of this we use the genus and the species which we call binomial nomenclature a two-part name the first part that we use is the genus the second part is a specific epithet or we call it the species name and we just say those two things we represent an organism they're also italicized so if we think of a human being we know that it's a homo sapien we would just write capital a Oh em oh and then sapien in lower case Homo sapiens and then if you've mentioned it once now sorry it looks like an a it should be an H um if you mention it one time and you have to refer to it again you can just put the first letter of the genus followed by the species name and that's good enough now if we take a look at our howling wolf down here we can see that it also has at least one name in each of these categories but if we were referring to the wolf we wouldn't need to use them all for example the domain that it finds out that in his view Karia its kingdom Animalia phylum Chordata class Mammalia order Carnivora family Canaday genus canis species lupus so the only thing we would use is the canis part and the lupus part here and we would write that canis with a capital c lupus with a lowercase L like I mentioned before the domain being the largest tax on in this group means that it's the most inclusive taxa has a bunch of kingdoms under it a bunch of filings bunch of classes orders family genus and species so it is the most inclusive taxa the least inclusive is just the species itself right here so if you were thinking which one is bigger and which one's smaller there you go the organisms are found in domains that first category and we have three major domains so one thing I got to throw out there is the fact that taxonomy changes with time and Rees research about twenty years ago when I was in high school there were five kingdoms that's how we learned about biology but now we've learned through DNA testing is that there's three bacterias domain bacteria domain Archaea domain Eukarya and the five kingdoms are no more they've changed it because the technology has changed and produce better results so of the two things that make up the prokaryotes we have bacteria and we have archaea very similar in structure and lifestyle and deal a lot more with those two particulars a little bit later in the semester the Eukarya include all eukaryotic organisms and there's some key differences between eukaryotic sand eukaryotes and prokaryotes again which we'll talk about later but this now has three simple kingdoms under its umbrella it has fungi has Plantae and Animalia well what happened the kingdom of protists kingdom Protista it's gone okay because they found through DNA and RNA testing is that the protists on the wide world of protists many of them were more like fungi some were like plant a and some were like animals more they were like each other so in that way we've now been changing the protists the former protists kingdom into new members of the kingdom fungi Plantae and Animalia i want to finish this talk with a discussion about what biologists do we all have a picture in our head of what a biologist is or looks like or does on a daily basis but I want to show you there is a huge variety huge diversity of Occupational possibilities out there that biologists do on a day to day basis so let's start with the simplest one which is just research biologists are out there looking at things that they observe and stunning them and then gaining a new body of knowledge which they can pass on to others so research is in play it always has been since organized thought about science has come into view of the public we also have education educational biologists tend to share what they know with students which is what I chose to do with you we also have healthcare so not only do we have veterinarians who treat animals and work with animals but if you think about any healthcare professional around you i if you really look down at what they know about they know about biology so physicians they know the biology of the human body dentists nurses and many other health care professionals are sharing and applying their knowledge of biology it just happens to be in a health care setting Environmental Management and conservation of course we want to preserve the natural areas around us on the planet and we don't want to you know pave over everything that's natural and change the way that our earth works there's value to conservation and there's valued treating animals with respect so in terms of environmental environmental management and conservation these are jobs that exist they're people that do them every single day and they work to keep our earth a healthier earth biotechnology at the turn of the century was really exploding with the Human Genome Project which was mapping out all of the DNA that a homo sapien a human being has stored in every single one of their thirty trillion cells that is a project that is thoroughly embedded in biotechnology so not only do they think do things like decode the human genome but as you can see they aid in advances of Agriculture food science and medicine they apply what they know using technology to make our lives better these five things here are pretty traditional let's take a look at the now of biology and see what else is out there besides these jobs so let's start with politics and policy science advisors work with lawmakers to create new legislation on topics such as biomedical research and environmental protection so there's the core strong feelings on both sides of those two issues biomedical research environmental protection so you have to have scientists working with legislators in order to push through some sensible and hopefully progressive in from information and choices that will better a society economics of course many states rely on their natural areas as a aid in their financial well-being our state is one of them so we have a huge amount of people come to our state to visit our Great Lakes and to take part in the wonderful natural areas that we have around our state mathematics the Human Genome Project without mathematics could have never been accomplished so the all of the genes sequencing that has been done with the human genome took a great deal of math in order to accomplish that feat so even though you know a lot of people take biology because it's not that much math in it if you really get into some biology you will see that math is present it is there and it's embedded into the science that we do business and industry of course biologists are going to work with drug and science product companies with their testing sales marketing and public relations that they have forensic science is utilizing science to help you with any types of investigations that deal with the law processing evidence solving crimes that's all a part of forensic science and yes it does exist in the biological world every poaching incident is a potential forensic science crime scene and it's dealt with in the same manner as a regular human based crime scene science writing communication and every major publication that puts out some kind of article based on science you're going to have someone who can communicate science well put into words and on paper so that average people average people who haven't taken a science pathway and like maybe able to understand the science that's being discussed and lastly even art has a place under the biology umbrella a great artist can bring pictures of biology to life they can allow us to see things that are hard to imagine in great clarity so you have all these diverse areas that are under the umbrella biology that many people don't typically think of firsthand when they think of the world of biology so I hope this opens up your view as well I hope you were able to understand some of the basics of biology by no means is it a full everything about everything about biology in fact it's the opposite of that we just scratch the surface of many topics to come this semester so if you take some information with you and you're able to merge that with what you learned from your book hopefully it will be more of an effective means to understanding material that's tough to grasp when I mention the book understand that your book is the glue that glues together all of these slides in this talk that I've done your book has to be a key part of how you learn biology if someone was to watch this lecture they might look at it as a disconnected bunch of slides that make no sense there's no order structure to them but by having a book the book will provide the glue where one part can then flow into another part and you'll see some of the same ideas reviewed again just happen to be on paper and it might put everything together for a better understanding so I hope to make more of these in the future I'm doing this so you have something to go back and look at maybe you miss some things during the first lecture maybe you forgot some of the slides and what was on them so I'm doing this for you hopefully we can keep doing this into the future and you can use it to your benefit as an aid to your biology learning experience so I'll see you next time you

Channel: ProfAmann

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Keywords: biology, basics, 100, 101

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Length: 59min 46sec (3586 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2013