Presque Isle; Marquette MI

A few weeks ago my class took a little field trip down to Presque Isle. Here, we started off talking about the different types of trees in the area and how to identify them. From here we went off into the woods and looked for specific things. Such things included; parasitism, commensalism, mutualism, intraspecific competition, interspecific competition. Also, we were asked to look at the micro habitat and how how it is different from the surrounding area, find an animal and describe its niche, as well as observe the biochemical cycle of Presque Isle.

This being said I will start with the example of parasitism I observed. It was really really hard finding all of these things in the area. This was because it is not a very big area and while we were there we did not see many animals at all. While we were there though I did manage to get eaten by many many little mosquitoes. I later realized that these mosquitoes where like parasites benefiting from living off of my blood.

An example of commensalism that I saw while we were there was with a squirrel and a tree. Even though we saw very few animals there two animals we did  see were squirrels and chipmunks. The example of commensalism that I saw was the squirrel using the tree to its benefit to house not only itself but all of its acorns. This helped the squirrel but neither helped nor harmed the tree.

I saw an example of mutualism before we even got up to the woods. Down by where you turn to come into the parking lot there are some flowers, sort of over by the playground. Over there when we were driving in we were stopped because the car in front of us wasn't moving while we were sitting there I was looking at the playground and then the flowers and I noticed a bee in the flowers. This is an example of mutualism because both the bee and the flower are benefiting from one another presence.

Finding interspecific competition was hard, but finding intraspecific competition was easy. As we were walking there were two squirrels fighting over something, I assumed some sort of acorn or food substance. This was funny to my because you usually don't see squirrels fight, or I don't at least. So even though it was kind of funny to me it was still a nice live example of intraspecific competition. I though I was seeing this again later in the day when my partner and I were walking back, but this time it was a squirrel chasing a chipmunk. This chipmunk had its cheeks full and my guess is that squirrel wanted what ever it was that chipmunk was carrying. Although to some that might have looked like playtime, to me it was an example of interspecific competition.

The micro habitat on Presque Isle is different from it's surrounding area because unlike everywhere else that part of the land hasn't been touched. Deer and chipmunks and birds and other animals are still able to and still do roam around freely in those parts because the have the food, trees and other plant life needed to survive. The areas surrounding Presque Isle are full of buildings, cars, roads and all this other stuff that has taken the place of these beautiful animal and plant organisms. These trees and animals couldn't survive in the surrounding areas because of the lack of space and other things.

The animal I choose to write a niche about was the squirrel; mostly because it was the only animal I saw more than 2 of. The squirrel has a niche of seed dispersal. They store food for the winter, but they do not find it all. So what ends up happening is they plant seeds in locations other than where they found them.

The biochemical cycle of Presque Isle is this; Nitrogen in the animals proteins (like deer) go into the ground where there is nitrogen in decaying matter and waste. Fro there bacteria "fix" nitrogen to be useful to plants which goes up through the soil into helping plants grow, the plants that the animals eat. The nitrogen in these plant proteins go back into the animals that eat these plants and the cycle starts all over again.