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Rigorously testing these criteria necessitates a synthetic approach, combining areas of research like community ecology, functional morphology, adaptation, quantitative genetics and phylogenetic systematics, [5] While satisfying all six criteria in a single study of character displacement is not often feasible, they provide the necessary ...
Phenotypic plasticity refers to some of the changes in an organism's behavior, morphology and physiology in response to a unique environment. [1] [2] Fundamental to the way in which organisms cope with environmental variation, phenotypic plasticity encompasses all types of environmentally induced changes (e.g. morphological, physiological, behavioural, phenological) that may or may not be ...
The etymology of the word "morphology" is from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ), meaning "form", and λόγος (lógos), meaning "word, study, research". [2] [3]While the concept of form in biology, opposed to function, dates back to Aristotle (see Aristotle's biology), the field of morphology was developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1790) and independently by the German anatomist ...
Ecomorphology or ecological morphology is the study of the relationship between the ecological role of an individual and its morphological adaptations. [1] The term "morphological" here is in the anatomical context. Both the morphology and ecology exhibited by an organism are directly or indirectly influenced by their environment, and ...
Morphological adaptations observed at the cellular level include atrophy, hypertrophy, hyperplasia, and metaplasia. [1] In the medical context, outside of specialized branches of biomedicine , morphological adaptations are not always referenced to the fundamental cellular level, but are observed and assessed at the level of tissues and organs .
Cursorial adaptations can be identified by morphological characteristics (e.g. loss of lateral digits as in ungulate species), physiological characteristics, maximum speed, and how often running is used in life. There is much debate over how to define a cursorial animal specifically.
[1] [2] Starting with a single ancestor, this process results in the speciation and phenotypic adaptation of an array of species exhibiting different morphological and physiological traits. The prototypical example of adaptive radiation is finch speciation on the Galapagos ("Darwin's finches"), but examples are known from around the world.
Among the most extreme examples known of this tendency was the fidelity of a ringed northern fulmar that returned to the same nest site for 25 years. The average number of birds returning to the same nest sites is high in all species studied, with around 91 percent for Bulwer's petrels , [ 61 ] and 85 percent of males and 76 percent of females ...