The wetlands are an incredibly complex and ecologically vital transitional zone between the bodies of water like rivers, lakes, and oceans, and the dry land itself.

The Earth's oceans are the largest biomes on the planet, and the womb of all Earth's life. From the emergence of the first cells, to the emergence of land-based organisms, the oceans have always been a fertile and fruitful place.

Biodiversity is the raw variation in the living things that inhabit some region of the world. Some habitats are barren, with low biodiversity, but other habitats are nutrient-rich & fruitful, populated by a wide diversity of organisms and characterized by the associated ecological complexity.

B

The ecosystem is the consummate totality of a regions ecology, including not just all the organisms & their interactions, but also their interactions with the physical environment, and the geochemical cycling that sustains it all. The biosphere is the totality of all ecosystems on the planet; it is the thin layer of life that clings to the cooling crust of our world.

When countless individuals and populations live in a certain habitat, it creates a diverse biological community, consisting of numerous species of plant, fungi, arthropod, and vertebrate.

When individuals live together, their collective behavior has a larger, meta-effect on the environment, quickly entangling the population into the larger ecological web that sustains their habitat.

The actions of an individual can have far-reaching effects. Behavioral ecology seeks to understand how individual organisms behave in their social and geophysical environment, and in turn, how the behaviors of the individual effect the world around them.

A brief introduction to ecology, including the relationship between organism & physical environment, the relationships between organisms, and the geochemical nutrient cycling that sustains the biosphere.

The viruses are pathogenic conglomerations of biomolecules, existing somewhere in the ambiguous void between true life, and unliving physical chemistry. Some say the viruses are not alive, others say they are the oldest branch on the tree of life...

The animals are dynamic biochemical superstructures; they are mobile food-processing tubes, equipped with a variety of appendages and morphologies adapted to a particular habitat & ecological niche.