Ecological Relationships in an Ecosystem
Your observations of how organisms relate to their environment show many instances of interrelationships in an ecosystem. A relationship may be beneficial or harmful to the ecosystem, but the overall effect is dynamic balance among the organisms and the populations that make up the ecosystem. Some interactions tend to overlap with one another; some are part of a larger interaction.
These interactions create a web of the following complex interactions in the environment: amensalism, coevolution, competition, herbivory, scavenging, predation, symbiosis, mutualism, parasitism, and commensalism.
Amensalism
The relationship in which one population is inhibited while the other one is not affected is called amensalism. An example of this is a culture medium that is made up of two species of bacteria to which an antibiotic was introduced. The antibiotic inhibited the growth of one species but did not affect the growth of the other species.
Do you consider human encroachment of forests as an example of amensalism? What organisms are affected?
