Plant Gall Activity Objectives 1. Utilize the scientific method and learn how scientific knowledge is obtained. Understand the ecological relationships involved with plant galls. Investigate food chains and predator-prey relationships. Introduction Ecologists and environmental scientists seek to understand the relationships between organisms and their environment.
Ecosystems typically contain many complex interactions that occur simultaneously.
These interactions can change the abundance of particular types of organisms, alter the flow of energy, and modify the rates at which nutrients cycle through the ecosystem. In order to learn more about the processes that occur in ecosystems, scientists rely on the scientific method, which is a formalized procedure of obtaining new knowledge. By making observations, scientists often ask questions about the relationships between organisms and how they interact with one another and their environment. These questions are then formulated as hypotheses, which are statements that are testable and can either be supported or refuted by the outcome of the appropriate experiment. Scientists then test these hypotheses using one or more experiments that manipulates the variable of interest.