CW4: 5432

From Environmental Technology

Chapter4 Questions

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a. No other place is so dramatically defined by annual rhythms of drought and flood, fire and sunshine and torrential rain.

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b.Marine/Estuarine,Mangroves,Coastal Prairie,Freshwater Marl Prairie,Freshwater Slough,Cypress, Hardwood Hammocks,Pinelands

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c.Alligator-Alligators live in freshwater lakes, rivers, and swamps. They occasionally live in brackish water.-Alligators eat a wide variety of foods including insects, crabs, crayfish, fish, frogs, snails, turtles, snakes, coots, grebes, wading birds, raccoons, otters, deer, and other alligators. Alligators are also known to eat dead animals.

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d.The West Indian manatee is a marine mammal that grows to 1,000 pounds - U.S. coastal waters from Louisiana to Virginia. Similar to humans, manatees are adapted to the tropics and in winter months must seek warm waters like Florida Bay, where they are often seen by visitors.-Manatees pull up and eat the abundant sea grasses and aquatic plants of the bay, consuming 10 to 15 percent of their body weight a day.-most of their problems are human-related. As our cities expand, their natural habitat is decreased. Added to this problem is the establishment of automatic locks and dams which can harm or kill manatees.

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e.No,Fire is not the end, but the beginning of new life in the Everglades; it has always been an integral part of the Everglades.

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f.Water in South Florida once flowed freely from the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee and southward over low-lying lands to the estuaries of Biscayne Bay, the Ten Thousand Islands, and Florida Bay. This shallow, slow-moving sheet of water covered almost 11,000 square miles, creating a mosaic of ponds, sloughs, sawgrass marshes, hardwood hammock, and forested uplands. For thousands of years this intricate system evolved into a finely balanced ecosystem that formed the biological infrastructure for the southern half of the state. Early colonial settlers and land developers viewed the Everglades as a worthless swamp in need of reclamation. The dream of draining the swampland took hold in the first half of the 1800s. By the 1880s developers started digging drainage canals, which took place without an understanding of the dynamics of the ecosystem and were generally inadequate for the task. They caused localized silting problems, but overall the ecosystem was resilient enough to sustain itself.

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