50. PROTS e-Learning Class 2011

Welcome to the E-Learning Class 2011 by 
The Professional Tour Guide School - PROTS.
Arusha, Tanzania.
P.O.Box 12582. Phone: +255 754 894077.
E-mail:  principal@protsonline.com 
Sanawari Campus.
Blogs managed by PROTS:

E-Class: www.protseclass.blogspot.com

School Blog: www.protschool.blogspot.com       

PROTS Students: www.protsstudents.blogspot.com

PROTS Graduates: www.protsgraduate.blogspot.com

Course offered: Professional Tour Guiding & Leadership.

1. Course Introduction.

Flexible & Progressive e-Class

Welcome to our Distant e-Learning Program – learning through Internet. 

Our e-classes are Progressive and Flexible - You go at a pace that is most ideal for your busy timetables.

2.  Target Group.

This program is most ideal for all kinds of Tour Guides - old & new.

If you are aspiring to join the industry or if you are already in but don’t have time to attend full time classes, then this is the most ideal program for you.

It’s a great opportunity for PROTS Students & Graduates and many others from other college.

3. Benefits.
To keep up to date with educational levels and standards in the Professional Tour Guiding field. 
In total it increases your Knowledge base greatly. 
A tour guide without knowledge is like a bank without money.

All the coursework and assignments will be published in your blog page. 

Publishing your progress makes everybody (esp. your boss/sponsor) know what you’re doing or acquiring in class on safari or elsewhere.

4. e-Class Page.

Once you join we open a Page for you.

 e.g. Herry B. Temba – a Guide at Macho ya Tanzania Ltd. http://protsmacho.blogspot.com/2011/05/8.html

This page will be used to publish all the info exchange between you and our e-training team as you progress through the course. Some input will be put in by the e-training team directly and some from the exchange of Mobile Phone calls and sms. 

5. Resources.

We have a rich e-Library that has been specially developed for this e-learning program. 

All students will be provided with course materials online.

6. Modules are: 

• Wildlife Ecology & Natural History.
• Professional Tour Guiding & Leadership Skills.
• Outdoor Leadership & Wilderness Survival Skills.
•  Camp Management & 
• Languages.

7. Links: 
You will be provided with links to the Lesson Pages, e.g.

http://protseclass.blogspot.com/2011/06/30.html

for Lesson 1 with 10 Lectures. Namely: 

• Introduction to Ecology. 
• Accumulation of Water.
• Adaptable Omnivore.
• Ancient Message?
• Animal Feeding.
• Animal Furniture.
• Animals from the Grasslands.
• Appropriate Egg.
• Aquatic Dinosaur.
• Army of Hunters.

Other lessons will be published progressively.

5. Recognized and Accredited Manuals.

All our lectures and course materials are from famous and internationally accredited manuals. 
E.g. since 1995, we have been using the famous book  The Pyramids of Life for the Wildlife Ecology & natural History. Very interesting stuff!
Professional Tour Guiding Skills are delivered from international standards.
Outdoor Leadership Skills is based on the Don't Die in the Bush and the famous American Wilderness First Responder approach.
Camp management provides all the Job descriptions of all levels in running a modern tourist camp.

You will be required to go through the lectures. Ask questions, if any, by SMS or through the Comments Box in your blog page.

Other Lessons on  

• Professional Tour Guiding Skills, 
• Outdoor leadership, 
• Camp Management and 
• Languages will be published soon.  

6. Home Work

Wildlife Ecology & Natural History Lectures: 

As mentioned above, the Lesson One is already published. Click the link and the page will open. Copy them in your exercise book so that you can study them without using the internet. Read them carefully. After reading & studying each lecture, then you are ready to start Home Works. Inform us by SMS or Comments Box in the Blog that you are ready. 

We will send you Home Works. 

Please remember that, when doing your Home Works, you will be required to use your own words to prove understanding. 
Home Works for Wildlife Ecology & Natural History will comprise of Wildlife Photos that you will be required to put the corresponding commentaries e.g. What you might say in case you see such a sighting during your Game Drive.

Home works may be sent through the Comments Box in your blog or by e-mail.

7. Assessment

Once we receive your Home Work we will assess it by correcting it and polishing it with our own inputs.

All these exchanges are published in your Blog Page.

8. Learning by Experience Approach.

Together with the above approach, the second approach is based on your experience. 

What you see and do.

This is an added advantage of our e-Learning and is most ideal for those employed as Guides.

As you

• Do Game Drives in the park,
• Receive tourists at Airport,
• Check them in/out at Hotel or
• Give a briefing at the Gate, or
• Deal with a Complaint or a
• React to a Dislocated Knee,

you will be required to send us information by SMS as to:

• What you see and do & 
• What you might say.

 We will instantly work on it, polish it and send you the correct Commentary, Skill or Recommendation to say or implement.

Example: If you’re doing a Game Drive and you are still at the same spot - you can use the our commentary right away! If you have moved, you can use it later. usually, it doesn't matter!

9. Joining & Fees.

With our traditional Modular Rolling Program you can start as soon as you are ready.   

For a start we have a trial fee of 25,000.= per month. 

Register by sending us your full name - the one you want to use, by SMS and we will open a page for you.
Payment may be Paid through our Bank Account, Western Union Money Transfers, at PROTS Office or M-PESA to 0754894077. 

More info visit our blog at www.protschool.blogspot.com

10. Graduation & NTA Level 5.

Certificates in Ordinary, Advanced level and Diploma will be awarded only upon successful completion. Advanced & Diploma levels requires Project Works.

Our Curriculum is based on the National Curriculum for Tour Guides - NTA Level 5 by NACTE.

Feel free to call me in case you need more details.

Thank you!

Mwl. Vedasto Izoba,

Principal & e-trainer.

The Professional Tour Guide School – PROTS.

Phone: +255 754 894077
email: principal@protsonline.com

www.protschool.blogspot.com

 We will react to your observations in the field.

 We will share your observations.

49.

48.

47. Paulo Phillipo Wenga

Hello Paulo.
Welcome to our e-class!

Congratulation for deciding to join this wonderful program and the e-training team is very confident that you will be among the best students in this program. 

We know just how determined you are.

You must read the Welcome page, above and understand how the program is designed to help you on your way to the top.

In case you don't understand something, please send us an SMS - Don't Call, as we want to record all the correspondences between you and the e-training team.

Once you study the details and you understand them, you will be ready to do home work.

Just inform us and we will send you the home work with further instructions.

Best Wishes,

Mwl. Izoba.

e-trainer.

Introduction to Ecology:
The specialization for the Diploma 2012 is Wildlife Ecology & Natural History.
Below, we have attached the Lecture for the Introduction to Ecology. You are required to read it and Understand it and then inform us so that we can send you the Home Work before you start the next lecture. Usually the Homework is comprised of Photographs (see samples below) that need you to write the explanation in your own words. It is therefore important to have a good knowledge of English.
Best Regards.
Izoba,
E-trainer.
***********************************************
INTRODUCTION
Have you ever seen an ecosystem? In a day's drive from the south to the north of the Serengeti you might see a dozen large mammal species - elephants, lions, wildebeest - two dozen small ones from hyrax to zorillas, a hundred or more species of birds and countless insects and trees. Even from so brief a visit, you will forever retain a sense of having glimpsed the edge of secret lives, episodes within a larger play. If you have time, you may come back, but you never visit the same ecosystem twice.
Consider this a rather special guidebook, one that goes beyond a roster of beasts and places. We aim to help readers understand where they are in an ecosystem, and once there, what is going on. African ecosystems are the focus because they are particularly rich in pattern, structure and process; we could have equally well chosen Nordic peat bogs or Australian scrubland. Why do we feel so good about seeing a seemingly disorganised sprawl of nature in the raw, the paradoxical co-existence of stillness and motion? In a herd of wildebeest, a landscape or the running of water, there is an insinuation of pattern that we find compelling but cannot easily define. Perhaps, within the apparent complexity of it all, we are also sensing patterns that resonate within us, acts played out by organisms with which we share one Earth and one atmosphere, organisms that are made of the very stuff we are. There is a delightful asymmetry in the natural world, a pervasive patchiness that we are only now just beginning to understand - after more than half a century of research on African plants and animals.
Some might argue that nature is best appreciated unfettered by human explanations, best enjoyed as a relief from the man-made world. We have come too far for that luxury. Let us ask instead with Gregory Bateson, one of biology's greatest lateral thinkers "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster, and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?"
Our "ravages" of nature have continued to be well chronicled over the years. Typically the emphasis is on the sensational elements of extinction and destruction. We charge in to tackle the problems of the sick and dying before fully understanding the functional success of the healthy and living. Yet because we know it is foolish to tinker with a complicated and valuable watch without first understanding what makes it tick, we often conclude that it is necessary to learn how the natural world functions in order to keep it - and thereby ourselves - in good working order. But sadly, our ability to conserve the natural world has not proved to correlate with the depth of our knowledge of its functioning. In the meanwhile, ecosystems continue to tick over in much the same way as they always have. There have of course been changes, in abundance and distribution, concomitant with natural and human-induced changes. Some changes are for the better, many for the worse. One element that has changed our view of nature is the use of stronger social and economic filters. We tend now to ask how the abundance of the natural world might be more equitably distributed to "stakeholders", and how those stakeholders can exhibit better manners to use the harvest in sustainable ways. Best estimates put the total value of the goods and services that ecosystems of the world supply at some $33 trillion, twice the total of the world's gross national products. Environmental ethics and economics aside, our first response to anything in nature is usually concerned with whether or not it "looks nice"; an emotional response most evident when we first visit tropical environments and confront the bewildering array of remarkable objects and events. We delight in the beauty of a butterfly, and shudder with revulsion at the ugly vulture. The butterfly is immediately acceptable, whereas the vulture, with its looks and predilection for corpses, is more likely to be dismissed simply on the strength of its appearance.
Such prejudices potentially close our minds to important aspects of life, and the emotional concepts of beauty and ugliness become more of a hindrance than a help to our understanding of the natural world. We must take a broader view. We do not have to be lepidopterists to appreciate the beauty of the butterfly, but surely we will view the vulture in a more sympathetic light when we understand how essential it is to the functioning of the tropical grasslands, and how appropriate its grim appearance is to its own functioning.
Ecology is the science that deals with the match between living organisms and their environment. Ethology is the study of behaviour - what animals do to best match their natural environment. This is far from a simple two-way relationship between beast and background: it is a network rather than a pipeline and adds to both the beauty and complexity of the thing. Even the boundary between ethologists and ecologists has become blurred with the contemporary designation "behavioural ecologist". Whatever we call them, they are naturalists at heart who share our wonder when viewing the beauties of nature. They are intellectual hunter-gatherers: after making the catch, their curiosity leads them to observe life's patterns more closely, to record and organise what they see.
We cannot all be card-carrying behavioural ecologists, yet our understanding and appreciation of how the natural world works will flourish once we look at its objects and events in their ecological perspective. A major facet of this perspective is governed by what might be called the Rule of Non-Randomness. Nothing is superfluous in the natural world. The living Earth is made up of linked biological systems, not a haphazard collection of objects and events. Patterns, sequences and interactions occur in nature in a manner comparable to the disposal of streets, traffic-flow, shop-distribution and electricity-use in a large city. Although life is not random, nor is it perfectly orderly. There is both predictability and perversity in the way things happen.
When you look at a butterfly in a particular place, or a vulture swooping down on to the carcass of a gazelle, you are not observing an isolated event. You are invariably glimpsing part of a system, part of a biological process that is measurable by the fact, predictable in the general, but not controllable at the instant. Given a little more knowledge, the mere presence of a butterfly could tell you something about the vegetation, the soil and climatic aspects of the system it is in. And the condition of the gazelle carcass, the species of the vultures about and their numbers, could tell you a fair
amount about the system's prey and predator populations.
Of course, in a global sense, the Earth itself is one vast biological system. But within it we can define thousands and
millions of others, quite distinct, internally consistent entities made up of a finite collection of the fundamental elements of
life. One system could be a two-square-metre pond, another a 2,000-square-kilometre stretch of grassland - whatever the
size, the principles governing the way it functions remain much the same.
It is often tempting to think of a biological system as a complex machine, built with environmental parts - climate, soils,
vegetation and animals. These parts are constantly shifting their relative positions but remain closely connected by
common biological laws, by their effects upon one another, and by their inter-dependence. But life is not a machine, for
several reasons.
First of all, a living system is paradoxically both closed and open; its organization is closed - you can draw a line
around it and enumerate its components - but its structure is open to other systems or just to the atmosphere. Eugene
Odum, ecology teacher to generations, encapsulated life's closed-open nature: "Matter circulates, energy dissipates." The
second characteristic of life is irreversibility. Once a life process has happened - a cell split, an egg laid, a behaviour
enacted, heat generated - there is no going back. Unlike machines, life follows the one-way arrow of time.
The third non-mechanical quality of life is that it is self-replicating to the point that most of the energy that living things
spend has to do with making more of themselves. No machines yet can make copies of themselves. In this book, we do
not intend to go down into the engine room of life, into the cells where they carry out the replication of DNA, the stuff that
genes and therefore life's forms are made of. We will live with the quip that the organism is DNA's way of making more
DNA and dwell occasionally on the surprising fact that we have not yet understood how the whole organism and its
lifestyle is made up of the sum of its parts.
The blueprints for body form, the propensity to behave in such-and such a way, indeed the sequence of growth and
development itself are copied from one generation to the next through reproduction. But the "message" copied is not a
one-to-one set of instructions, like how to assemble a model aeroplane. The quantity of information contained in cat DNA
is too small to describe a cat; that in human DNA is not even enough to map our brains. Just how a whole functioning cat
or human is built, we don't yet know, any more than how water spirals down a plug hole, even with a pretty good
knowledge of fluid dynamics and the properties of bonded hydrogen and oxygen.
We may not know how to do life, yet we have come quite far in describing its three main qualities: pattern, structure
and process. Pattern has to do with how life's bits and pieces are arranged, rather like a blueprint or a map. Structure is
concerned with the physical parts and their linkages, that is, the organism itself, assembled and ready to go. Process has
to do with activity - the enactment, the doing, the unfolding of the play.
In nature there is a myriad of patterns and more structures than we can count. But the number of processes is
relatively small, and repeated over and over again in all biological systems. This fundamental fact has determined the
form of our book, which is divided into three parts: the Grasslands, the lakes and Rivers, and the Forests of tropical Africa.
We have chosen African ecosystems to illustrate the processes, but the same ones are played out all around the world.
Grassland, lakes and rivers, forests - these are general designations of ecosystem types, clearly recognisable patches
laid over continental landscapes. They each have their limits of tolerance and some critical defining physical
characteristics: the presence and abundance of water is the major one, as are altitude and temperature. These types are
not arbitrary descriptive labels, for they have complex internal structures. In many respects they are like big sprawling
organisms. They replicate themselves and, if conditions allowed, would overrun each other. They are the highest levels of
ecological organisation, and for this reason serve as the major divisions of this book.
Following the general process of nutrient cycling, from the Earth to the vegetation to the animals and back again to the
earth, we demonstrate how just a few of the Earth's countless life forms deal with the three life processes common to all:
how they find their food; how they avoid becoming some other organism's food; how they perpetuate their species. The
habitats to which our protagonists belong range from bare rock to forest; from soda lake to semi desert. The life forms
themselves vary from blades of grass, trees and microscopic protozoa to elephants, insects, reptiles and cats of all sizes.
And our purpose? It is to show that even amid such an apparent confusion of place, object and event there is always
orderliness; the very diversity itself is determined by biological laws that no organism can escape. And understanding this,
the "fearful symmetry" of the natural world is no longer perplexing and remote. It is beautiful and close.
We start our investigation into the underlying order of the natural world with life's building blocks, the chemical elements
of the Earth itself. Every once in a while the Earth reminds us that it is still forming: a village disappears, a new island
pops up. OI-Doinyo lengai, the Mountain of God in northern Tanzania, is only a few million years old. It last puffed ash
over the Serengeti Plains in 1966 and is still changing shape from year to year. The materials bound in its barren volcanic
mass contain mineral resources beneficial to a living system, but that must first be freed from the rock. Sun and rain, heat
and cold, organic acids and the roots of pioneer plants very slowly insinuate themselves into the physical and chemical
chinks of the parent material, which crumbles, mixes with the organic debris and becomes soil thus joining the roundabout
of life.
Consider one atom of one element in the soil, say phosphorus - a particle of one of the usable mineral resources in a
living system. If we could tag that particle, we might be able to follow its radioactive trail and trace its movements through
the system. We would watch as the atom is absorbed by the root of a plant and incorporated into the plant itself. If the
plant was a grass, a wildebeest might eat it. Our atom of phosphorus would then perhaps be used in building wildebeest
flesh. The wildebeest might be caught and eaten by an African wild dog, and the same atom of phosphorus that was once
part of the soil, would now become part of the dog. The dog would excrete, or die, and the atom would thus be made
available to the maintenance of yet another class or organism, the decomposers. These are the animals, from bacteria to vultures who complete the disassembly of organic structure; they bridge the gap between life and death and thus return our atom of phosphorus to the soil. It is then ready to be run through the system once more.
The path the atom has taken is called a food chain. There are complex alternative paths in all biological systems called food webs, inter-connected food chains by which mineral resources move through a system. A gazelle could have eaten the same grass, and the phosphorus been excreted out the next day. Or it could have passed into a cheetah that caught the gazelle. Thence to a vulture or to other decomposers and back, inevitably, to the soil.
Having followed the path of our element from the soil through the plant and animal communities back to the soil, we would find ourselves close to where we started - probably no more than a hundred kilometres - having travelled within an ecosystem, an integrated, self maintaining biological unit. It is the set of all the places through which a particular atom is likely to pass.
Every ecosystem has its own special characteristics. It has, for example, a geographical location. The boundary of the ecosystem often coincides with a number of physical boundaries, like a Rift Valley wall, or a lake shore, or the interface between two soil types. When it does, we might find vegetation boundaries congruent with the physical ones, such as the line between forest and grassland. As we shall see later, most animals usually stay on one side or the other of ecosystem boundaries. Of course, boundaries need not be barriers: it is possible for animals to move across them. But the network of processes that go on between soil, plants and animals makes it more likely that the atom of phosphorus will stay within one particular ecosystem.
Different ecosystems have different weights - or biomasses - of plants and animals, usually a function of the climate and the amount of nutrients available from the earth. They have different topographies, soils and plant formations. There must be, of course, some form of energy that moves our atom and all the other materials round an ecosystem. The sun is the only natural source of energy in our solar system; its radiance gives light and warmth. But nobody can eat sunlight. The only way the sun's energy can be trapped is by green plants in the process of photosynthesis, that is to say "making with light". What do plants make? They make a miracle: by linking heaven and earth, they make the first food.
Given the energy of the sun acting on water from the Earth, carbon dioxide from the air, and chlorophyll in the plant cells, green plants produce oxygen and simple sugars - the first table-setting of energy and materials in the food chain. This is the primary production of a living system, the basic "trophic" or nourishment level. Thereafter, the sun's energy pumps through food chains with water providing not just moisture but electrons for energy transfer. Thus energy travels with the minerals from one trophic level up to the next: from primary production to herbivores (eaters of plants), to carnivores (eaters of flesh), to decomposers (eaters of everything).
1St trophic level: primary production 1sq. mile of grass
2nd trophic ievei: herbivores 100 gazelles
3rd trophic level: carnivores 1 lion
As originally formulated in the mid-nineteenth century, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us about the behaviour of energy in a system. Over recent years it has survived scrutiny by quantum physicists and still carries the practical message that if you change the form of energy you lose some of it in the process, as heat. You get hot when you run, because of the heat produced when the chemical energy of your food supply is changed into the kinetic energy of movement. Just growing or replacing worn cells requires energy conversion, so all organisms, even blades of grass, give off heat, the tax of living.
Grass is only concerned with being grass. Much of the energy it absorbs from the sun is dispersed in heat so as to maintain itself. Only part of the sun's energy that became grass remains available to be eaten by, say, a gazelle. Gazelles must maintain themselves too, and in doing so use about a tenth of the energy they derived from the grass. Hence the leopard that eats the gazelle gets in the end only a hundredth of the sun's energy which was originally trapped by the grass. Although studies of a variety of ecosystems have shown that the trophic level energy transfer varies between 2 and 24 per cent, the average seems to be 10, evidence enough for declaring a general tithe for maintenance.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics thus explains why there could never be more gazelle meat than grass tissue and never more leopards or lions than gazelles: there is not enough energy to maintain them. The mandatory heat loss as each organism in an ecosystem keeps itself going decides the relative amounts of energy, numbers and biomass in the trophic level above. The decomposers, we shall see, are a special class of beasts who eventually feed on all trophic levels. Nevertheless, they too are subject to the law, and must exist at a smaller biomass than their food source.
Thus energy inevitably diminishes as it moves up through the food chains, and a pyramid of life is formed, one that applies to all ecosystems, excepting some marine systems based on phytoplankton. In this book, we shall use the pyramidal stack of trophic levels to help guide us through our three main African ecosystem types and the basic patterns of their elements and processes.
Primary production is the basic food source in every ecosystem. Each habitat presents its basic food source in a particular pattern, the form and extent of which is determined by geology and climate (the controlling factors), and modified by fire and by the animals eating it (the modifying factors).
When we talk of eating and of the movements of energy and materials from one trophic level to another, we begin to cross the thin line between the sciences of ecology and behaviour. Materials do not move themselves but are moved by animals in their pursuit of food. When a lion eats a gazelle, the elements in that gazelle at once change their position in
the pyramid of life. Of course, the gazelle will try not to become the lion's food and it is by avoiding predators the obverse of feeding behaviour that a species attempts to keep its materials in its own trophic level.
Within a trophic level, we observe in reproduction the complex rituals and elaborate adaptations of breeding behaviour. These maintain the integrity of a species, and the internal organisation of an animal or plant community. They are part of species' social organisation, which quite apart from ensuring breeding success, may also assist in the pursuit of food, or in predator avoidance. We also see animals indulge in "comfort behaviour": scratching, preening, rubbing and rolling all serve to keep plumage or pelage in top condition in order to protect, propel or repel predators and parasites. Such behaviours keep materials moving around within a trophic level, rather than from one to another.
Questions abound: Why is an organism built the way it is? Why does a plant grow in a particular place? Why does an animal behave the way it does? Many answers are not yet known, but we will try to show how a curious naturalist might think about the question and set about finding the answer.
In one sense there are as many answers as there are organisms, answers that have to do with place and time. But these are only part of the basic answer: an organism is the way it is, and does what it does, in order to stay fit and alive long enough to reproduce more of itself. Behavioural ecologists would refer to an animal "maximising its inclusive fitness". Whatever we call the relentless quest for selfreplication, it is clearly the most important of life's concepts, one that should be understood at the outset.
We said earlier that animals and plants are not machines: the complex of chemical information encoded in the genes in the heart of every cell cannot be perfectly replicated each time an individual reproduces. For this reason we find variability within species, or even between siblings. Some products of reproduction fare better, others worse. There is no perfect solution. Every behaviour, every characteristic is a compromise between its costs and its benefits.
The impartial judge in this lottery of breeding and survival is the environment. Those organisms best adapted to life in their surroundings will produce more young, bearing the very characteristics that gave their parents a survival edge. In this way, the environment is said to select the best strategy for survival from the number of alternatives offered each time there is reproduction and a recombination of the genetic information that defines a species. We have, then, natural selection, the most important concept of life in the natural world. Yet there may be imperfection in the beauty of natural selection. For over thirty years, biological sciences have continued to wonder why, even as we know more and more about the details of biological structure and functioning, we cannot yet model the whole system. There are still some quite large lingering mysteries, such as the origin of life, of sex and of human consciousness. We are still not certain how a single fertilised cell develops into an elephant or an ecologist. Perhaps we need more data and more computing power to reconstruct the whole with near-perfect understanding or perhaps we need a new way of looking at the networked structures of the living world. This book does not pretend to account for the last mysterious leap from component parts to whole systems. Whatever view we take, the only one that can help understanding is a contextual view, structured windows into the teeming and often confusing web of life, as opposed to a list of events or a catalogue of players. After all, experts who think about such things twenty-four hours a day recently admitted that there is as yet no calculus to explain the behaviour of complex adaptive systems, be it weather, stock markets, human consciousness or ecosystems.
This is our taking-off point. We hear some schools of thought questioning whether natural selection can explain everything, and others admitting that they cannot always gather the particulates and thereby account for the whole. It is therefore still meaningful and interesting to use the time-honoured marriage of images and poetry, words and pictures, to do the work for us, to help create a "momentary stay against confusion".
 ****************************************************
Home Work Photos.
12 February 2012. 
Hello Paul,
Please find about 25 photos for your Homework.
You are required to write a few details on each photo using your own words, that you might say once you encounter sight sighting during your guiding duties with tourists.
Give the photo in question your own title and write the details below that title:
E.g. Pond:
A pond may be regarded as among the smallest ecosystems in nature .......


Best regards.

*********************************************************************************

46. Farooq Ismail

Welcome to Page 46 for Mr. Farooq Ismail.

Welcome to our e-class!

Congratulation for deciding to join this wonderful program and the e-training team is very confident that you will be among the best students in this program. 

We know just how determined you are.

You must read the Welcome page, above and understand how the program is designed to help you on your way to the top.

In case you don't understand something, please send us an SMS - Don't Call, as we want to record all the correspondences between you and the e-training team.

You will start with the Chapter One - Tourism Industry.

Once you study the details and you understand them, you will be ready to do home work.

Just inform us and we will send you the home work with further instructions.

Best Wishes,

Mwl. Izoba.

e-trainer.
Hello Farouq, 
We have not been in touch for a while and I have no idea about your progress. 
Anyway, I need to inform you that our Diploma Theme for 2012 is Wildlife Ecology & Natural History. If you are ready please join us with the Introduction to Ecology (below).

Introduction to Ecology:
The specialization for the Diploma 2012 is Wildlife Ecology & Natural History.
Below, we have attached the Lecture for the Introduction to Ecology. You are required to read it and Understand it and then inform us so that we can send you the Home Work before you start the next lecture. Usually the Homework is comprised of Photographs (see samples below) that need you to write the explanation in your own words. It is therefore important to have a good knowledge of English.
Best Regards.
Izoba,
E-trainer.
***********************************************
INTRODUCTION
Have you ever seen an ecosystem? In a day's drive from the south to the north of the Serengeti you might see a dozen large mammal species - elephants, lions, wildebeest - two dozen small ones from hyrax to zorillas, a hundred or more species of birds and countless insects and trees. Even from so brief a visit, you will forever retain a sense of having glimpsed the edge of secret lives, episodes within a larger play. If you have time, you may come back, but you never visit the same ecosystem twice.
Consider this a rather special guidebook, one that goes beyond a roster of beasts and places. We aim to help readers understand where they are in an ecosystem, and once there, what is going on. African ecosystems are the focus because they are particularly rich in pattern, structure and process; we could have equally well chosen Nordic peat bogs or Australian scrubland. Why do we feel so good about seeing a seemingly disorganised sprawl of nature in the raw, the paradoxical co-existence of stillness and motion? In a herd of wildebeest, a landscape or the running of water, there is an insinuation of pattern that we find compelling but cannot easily define. Perhaps, within the apparent complexity of it all, we are also sensing patterns that resonate within us, acts played out by organisms with which we share one Earth and one atmosphere, organisms that are made of the very stuff we are. There is a delightful asymmetry in the natural world, a pervasive patchiness that we are only now just beginning to understand - after more than half a century of research on African plants and animals.
Some might argue that nature is best appreciated unfettered by human explanations, best enjoyed as a relief from the man-made world. We have come too far for that luxury. Let us ask instead with Gregory Bateson, one of biology's greatest lateral thinkers "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster, and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?"
Our "ravages" of nature have continued to be well chronicled over the years. Typically the emphasis is on the sensational elements of extinction and destruction. We charge in to tackle the problems of the sick and dying before fully understanding the functional success of the healthy and living. Yet because we know it is foolish to tinker with a complicated and valuable watch without first understanding what makes it tick, we often conclude that it is necessary to learn how the natural world functions in order to keep it - and thereby ourselves - in good working order. But sadly, our ability to conserve the natural world has not proved to correlate with the depth of our knowledge of its functioning. In the meanwhile, ecosystems continue to tick over in much the same way as they always have. There have of course been changes, in abundance and distribution, concomitant with natural and human-induced changes. Some changes are for the better, many for the worse. One element that has changed our view of nature is the use of stronger social and economic filters. We tend now to ask how the abundance of the natural world might be more equitably distributed to "stakeholders", and how those stakeholders can exhibit better manners to use the harvest in sustainable ways. Best estimates put the total value of the goods and services that ecosystems of the world supply at some $33 trillion, twice the total of the world's gross national products. Environmental ethics and economics aside, our first response to anything in nature is usually concerned with whether or not it "looks nice"; an emotional response most evident when we first visit tropical environments and confront the bewildering array of remarkable objects and events. We delight in the beauty of a butterfly, and shudder with revulsion at the ugly vulture. The butterfly is immediately acceptable, whereas the vulture, with its looks and predilection for corpses, is more likely to be dismissed simply on the strength of its appearance.
Such prejudices potentially close our minds to important aspects of life, and the emotional concepts of beauty and ugliness become more of a hindrance than a help to our understanding of the natural world. We must take a broader view. We do not have to be lepidopterists to appreciate the beauty of the butterfly, but surely we will view the vulture in a more sympathetic light when we understand how essential it is to the functioning of the tropical grasslands, and how appropriate its grim appearance is to its own functioning.
Ecology is the science that deals with the match between living organisms and their environment. Ethology is the study of behaviour - what animals do to best match their natural environment. This is far from a simple two-way relationship between beast and background: it is a network rather than a pipeline and adds to both the beauty and complexity of the thing. Even the boundary between ethologists and ecologists has become blurred with the contemporary designation "behavioural ecologist". Whatever we call them, they are naturalists at heart who share our wonder when viewing the beauties of nature. They are intellectual hunter-gatherers: after making the catch, their curiosity leads them to observe life's patterns more closely, to record and organise what they see.
We cannot all be card-carrying behavioural ecologists, yet our understanding and appreciation of how the natural world works will flourish once we look at its objects and events in their ecological perspective. A major facet of this perspective is governed by what might be called the Rule of Non-Randomness. Nothing is superfluous in the natural world. The living Earth is made up of linked biological systems, not a haphazard collection of objects and events. Patterns, sequences and interactions occur in nature in a manner comparable to the disposal of streets, traffic-flow, shop-distribution and electricity-use in a large city. Although life is not random, nor is it perfectly orderly. There is both predictability and perversity in the way things happen.
When you look at a butterfly in a particular place, or a vulture swooping down on to the carcass of a gazelle, you are not observing an isolated event. You are invariably glimpsing part of a system, part of a biological process that is measurable by the fact, predictable in the general, but not controllable at the instant. Given a little more knowledge, the mere presence of a butterfly could tell you something about the vegetation, the soil and climatic aspects of the system it is in. And the condition of the gazelle carcass, the species of the vultures about and their numbers, could tell you a fair
amount about the system's prey and predator populations.
Of course, in a global sense, the Earth itself is one vast biological system. But within it we can define thousands and
millions of others, quite distinct, internally consistent entities made up of a finite collection of the fundamental elements of
life. One system could be a two-square-metre pond, another a 2,000-square-kilometre stretch of grassland - whatever the
size, the principles governing the way it functions remain much the same.
It is often tempting to think of a biological system as a complex machine, built with environmental parts - climate, soils,
vegetation and animals. These parts are constantly shifting their relative positions but remain closely connected by
common biological laws, by their effects upon one another, and by their inter-dependence. But life is not a machine, for
several reasons.
First of all, a living system is paradoxically both closed and open; its organization is closed - you can draw a line
around it and enumerate its components - but its structure is open to other systems or just to the atmosphere. Eugene
Odum, ecology teacher to generations, encapsulated life's closed-open nature: "Matter circulates, energy dissipates." The
second characteristic of life is irreversibility. Once a life process has happened - a cell split, an egg laid, a behaviour
enacted, heat generated - there is no going back. Unlike machines, life follows the one-way arrow of time.
The third non-mechanical quality of life is that it is self-replicating to the point that most of the energy that living things
spend has to do with making more of themselves. No machines yet can make copies of themselves. In this book, we do
not intend to go down into the engine room of life, into the cells where they carry out the replication of DNA, the stuff that
genes and therefore life's forms are made of. We will live with the quip that the organism is DNA's way of making more
DNA and dwell occasionally on the surprising fact that we have not yet understood how the whole organism and its
lifestyle is made up of the sum of its parts.
The blueprints for body form, the propensity to behave in such-and such a way, indeed the sequence of growth and
development itself are copied from one generation to the next through reproduction. But the "message" copied is not a
one-to-one set of instructions, like how to assemble a model aeroplane. The quantity of information contained in cat DNA
is too small to describe a cat; that in human DNA is not even enough to map our brains. Just how a whole functioning cat
or human is built, we don't yet know, any more than how water spirals down a plug hole, even with a pretty good
knowledge of fluid dynamics and the properties of bonded hydrogen and oxygen.
We may not know how to do life, yet we have come quite far in describing its three main qualities: pattern, structure
and process. Pattern has to do with how life's bits and pieces are arranged, rather like a blueprint or a map. Structure is
concerned with the physical parts and their linkages, that is, the organism itself, assembled and ready to go. Process has
to do with activity - the enactment, the doing, the unfolding of the play.
In nature there is a myriad of patterns and more structures than we can count. But the number of processes is
relatively small, and repeated over and over again in all biological systems. This fundamental fact has determined the
form of our book, which is divided into three parts: the Grasslands, the lakes and Rivers, and the Forests of tropical Africa.
We have chosen African ecosystems to illustrate the processes, but the same ones are played out all around the world.
Grassland, lakes and rivers, forests - these are general designations of ecosystem types, clearly recognisable patches
laid over continental landscapes. They each have their limits of tolerance and some critical defining physical
characteristics: the presence and abundance of water is the major one, as are altitude and temperature. These types are
not arbitrary descriptive labels, for they have complex internal structures. In many respects they are like big sprawling
organisms. They replicate themselves and, if conditions allowed, would overrun each other. They are the highest levels of
ecological organisation, and for this reason serve as the major divisions of this book.
Following the general process of nutrient cycling, from the Earth to the vegetation to the animals and back again to the
earth, we demonstrate how just a few of the Earth's countless life forms deal with the three life processes common to all:
how they find their food; how they avoid becoming some other organism's food; how they perpetuate their species. The
habitats to which our protagonists belong range from bare rock to forest; from soda lake to semi desert. The life forms
themselves vary from blades of grass, trees and microscopic protozoa to elephants, insects, reptiles and cats of all sizes.
And our purpose? It is to show that even amid such an apparent confusion of place, object and event there is always
orderliness; the very diversity itself is determined by biological laws that no organism can escape. And understanding this,
the "fearful symmetry" of the natural world is no longer perplexing and remote. It is beautiful and close.
We start our investigation into the underlying order of the natural world with life's building blocks, the chemical elements
of the Earth itself. Every once in a while the Earth reminds us that it is still forming: a village disappears, a new island
pops up. OI-Doinyo lengai, the Mountain of God in northern Tanzania, is only a few million years old. It last puffed ash
over the Serengeti Plains in 1966 and is still changing shape from year to year. The materials bound in its barren volcanic
mass contain mineral resources beneficial to a living system, but that must first be freed from the rock. Sun and rain, heat
and cold, organic acids and the roots of pioneer plants very slowly insinuate themselves into the physical and chemical
chinks of the parent material, which crumbles, mixes with the organic debris and becomes soil thus joining the roundabout
of life.
Consider one atom of one element in the soil, say phosphorus - a particle of one of the usable mineral resources in a
living system. If we could tag that particle, we might be able to follow its radioactive trail and trace its movements through
the system. We would watch as the atom is absorbed by the root of a plant and incorporated into the plant itself. If the
plant was a grass, a wildebeest might eat it. Our atom of phosphorus would then perhaps be used in building wildebeest
flesh. The wildebeest might be caught and eaten by an African wild dog, and the same atom of phosphorus that was once
part of the soil, would now become part of the dog. The dog would excrete, or die, and the atom would thus be made
available to the maintenance of yet another class or organism, the decomposers. These are the animals, from bacteria to vultures who complete the disassembly of organic structure; they bridge the gap between life and death and thus return our atom of phosphorus to the soil. It is then ready to be run through the system once more.
The path the atom has taken is called a food chain. There are complex alternative paths in all biological systems called food webs, inter-connected food chains by which mineral resources move through a system. A gazelle could have eaten the same grass, and the phosphorus been excreted out the next day. Or it could have passed into a cheetah that caught the gazelle. Thence to a vulture or to other decomposers and back, inevitably, to the soil.
Having followed the path of our element from the soil through the plant and animal communities back to the soil, we would find ourselves close to where we started - probably no more than a hundred kilometres - having travelled within an ecosystem, an integrated, self maintaining biological unit. It is the set of all the places through which a particular atom is likely to pass.
Every ecosystem has its own special characteristics. It has, for example, a geographical location. The boundary of the ecosystem often coincides with a number of physical boundaries, like a Rift Valley wall, or a lake shore, or the interface between two soil types. When it does, we might find vegetation boundaries congruent with the physical ones, such as the line between forest and grassland. As we shall see later, most animals usually stay on one side or the other of ecosystem boundaries. Of course, boundaries need not be barriers: it is possible for animals to move across them. But the network of processes that go on between soil, plants and animals makes it more likely that the atom of phosphorus will stay within one particular ecosystem.
Different ecosystems have different weights - or biomasses - of plants and animals, usually a function of the climate and the amount of nutrients available from the earth. They have different topographies, soils and plant formations. There must be, of course, some form of energy that moves our atom and all the other materials round an ecosystem. The sun is the only natural source of energy in our solar system; its radiance gives light and warmth. But nobody can eat sunlight. The only way the sun's energy can be trapped is by green plants in the process of photosynthesis, that is to say "making with light". What do plants make? They make a miracle: by linking heaven and earth, they make the first food.
Given the energy of the sun acting on water from the Earth, carbon dioxide from the air, and chlorophyll in the plant cells, green plants produce oxygen and simple sugars - the first table-setting of energy and materials in the food chain. This is the primary production of a living system, the basic "trophic" or nourishment level. Thereafter, the sun's energy pumps through food chains with water providing not just moisture but electrons for energy transfer. Thus energy travels with the minerals from one trophic level up to the next: from primary production to herbivores (eaters of plants), to carnivores (eaters of flesh), to decomposers (eaters of everything).
1St trophic level: primary production 1sq. mile of grass
2nd trophic ievei: herbivores 100 gazelles
3rd trophic level: carnivores 1 lion
As originally formulated in the mid-nineteenth century, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us about the behaviour of energy in a system. Over recent years it has survived scrutiny by quantum physicists and still carries the practical message that if you change the form of energy you lose some of it in the process, as heat. You get hot when you run, because of the heat produced when the chemical energy of your food supply is changed into the kinetic energy of movement. Just growing or replacing worn cells requires energy conversion, so all organisms, even blades of grass, give off heat, the tax of living.
Grass is only concerned with being grass. Much of the energy it absorbs from the sun is dispersed in heat so as to maintain itself. Only part of the sun's energy that became grass remains available to be eaten by, say, a gazelle. Gazelles must maintain themselves too, and in doing so use about a tenth of the energy they derived from the grass. Hence the leopard that eats the gazelle gets in the end only a hundredth of the sun's energy which was originally trapped by the grass. Although studies of a variety of ecosystems have shown that the trophic level energy transfer varies between 2 and 24 per cent, the average seems to be 10, evidence enough for declaring a general tithe for maintenance.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics thus explains why there could never be more gazelle meat than grass tissue and never more leopards or lions than gazelles: there is not enough energy to maintain them. The mandatory heat loss as each organism in an ecosystem keeps itself going decides the relative amounts of energy, numbers and biomass in the trophic level above. The decomposers, we shall see, are a special class of beasts who eventually feed on all trophic levels. Nevertheless, they too are subject to the law, and must exist at a smaller biomass than their food source.
Thus energy inevitably diminishes as it moves up through the food chains, and a pyramid of life is formed, one that applies to all ecosystems, excepting some marine systems based on phytoplankton. In this book, we shall use the pyramidal stack of trophic levels to help guide us through our three main African ecosystem types and the basic patterns of their elements and processes.
Primary production is the basic food source in every ecosystem. Each habitat presents its basic food source in a particular pattern, the form and extent of which is determined by geology and climate (the controlling factors), and modified by fire and by the animals eating it (the modifying factors).
When we talk of eating and of the movements of energy and materials from one trophic level to another, we begin to cross the thin line between the sciences of ecology and behaviour. Materials do not move themselves but are moved by animals in their pursuit of food. When a lion eats a gazelle, the elements in that gazelle at once change their position in
the pyramid of life. Of course, the gazelle will try not to become the lion's food and it is by avoiding predators the obverse of feeding behaviour that a species attempts to keep its materials in its own trophic level.
Within a trophic level, we observe in reproduction the complex rituals and elaborate adaptations of breeding behaviour. These maintain the integrity of a species, and the internal organisation of an animal or plant community. They are part of species' social organisation, which quite apart from ensuring breeding success, may also assist in the pursuit of food, or in predator avoidance. We also see animals indulge in "comfort behaviour": scratching, preening, rubbing and rolling all serve to keep plumage or pelage in top condition in order to protect, propel or repel predators and parasites. Such behaviours keep materials moving around within a trophic level, rather than from one to another.
Questions abound: Why is an organism built the way it is? Why does a plant grow in a particular place? Why does an animal behave the way it does? Many answers are not yet known, but we will try to show how a curious naturalist might think about the question and set about finding the answer.
In one sense there are as many answers as there are organisms, answers that have to do with place and time. But these are only part of the basic answer: an organism is the way it is, and does what it does, in order to stay fit and alive long enough to reproduce more of itself. Behavioural ecologists would refer to an animal "maximising its inclusive fitness". Whatever we call the relentless quest for selfreplication, it is clearly the most important of life's concepts, one that should be understood at the outset.
We said earlier that animals and plants are not machines: the complex of chemical information encoded in the genes in the heart of every cell cannot be perfectly replicated each time an individual reproduces. For this reason we find variability within species, or even between siblings. Some products of reproduction fare better, others worse. There is no perfect solution. Every behaviour, every characteristic is a compromise between its costs and its benefits.
The impartial judge in this lottery of breeding and survival is the environment. Those organisms best adapted to life in their surroundings will produce more young, bearing the very characteristics that gave their parents a survival edge. In this way, the environment is said to select the best strategy for survival from the number of alternatives offered each time there is reproduction and a recombination of the genetic information that defines a species. We have, then, natural selection, the most important concept of life in the natural world. Yet there may be imperfection in the beauty of natural selection. For over thirty years, biological sciences have continued to wonder why, even as we know more and more about the details of biological structure and functioning, we cannot yet model the whole system. There are still some quite large lingering mysteries, such as the origin of life, of sex and of human consciousness. We are still not certain how a single fertilised cell develops into an elephant or an ecologist. Perhaps we need more data and more computing power to reconstruct the whole with near-perfect understanding or perhaps we need a new way of looking at the networked structures of the living world. This book does not pretend to account for the last mysterious leap from component parts to whole systems. Whatever view we take, the only one that can help understanding is a contextual view, structured windows into the teeming and often confusing web of life, as opposed to a list of events or a catalogue of players. After all, experts who think about such things twenty-four hours a day recently admitted that there is as yet no calculus to explain the behaviour of complex adaptive systems, be it weather, stock markets, human consciousness or ecosystems.
This is our taking-off point. We hear some schools of thought questioning whether natural selection can explain everything, and others admitting that they cannot always gather the particulates and thereby account for the whole. It is therefore still meaningful and interesting to use the time-honoured marriage of images and poetry, words and pictures, to do the work for us, to help create a "momentary stay against confusion".

Examples of Home Work samples.