Final answer:
Limiting factors such as food and space are crucial in determining the carrying capacity of an ecosystem, where population growth transitions to a logistic growth pattern. Other factors, alongside energy loss in food chains, also contribute to this dynamic.
Step-by-step explanation:
Food supply and space are limiting factors that can lower the population growth rate in organisms.
When these limiting factors are present, organisms show logistic type of growth, represented by an S-curve.
Food supply can be a limiting factor, just like when there are fewer hamburgers at a lunch table compared to the number of people sitting down.
Eventually, everyone will not be able to eat if more and more people keep coming. In nature, organisms that cannot obtain food will either die or find a new place to live.
Other limiting factors include light, water, nutrients, oxygen, the ability of an ecosystem to recycle nutrients and waste, disease and parasites, temperature, space, and predation.
One major factor that limits the number of steps in a food chain is energy.
Energy is lost at each trophic level and between trophic levels as heat and in the transfer to decomposers.
As a result, after a limited number of energy transfers, the amount of energy remaining in the food chain may not be enough to support viable populations at higher trophic levels.
So, limiting factors of food and space will first be observed in Figure 34.03 at number that represents the decrease in population growth rate due to these factors.
What are the limiting factors of food and space will first be observed in Figure 34.03 at number?