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This reliance underscores the critical role of native plants in supporting ecological food chains. The distinction between generalists and specialists is not limited to animals. For example, some plants require a narrow range of temperatures, soil conditions and precipitation to survive while others can tolerate a broader range of conditions.
Ecological facilitation or probiosis describes species interactions that benefit at least one of the participants and cause harm to neither. [1] Facilitations can be categorized as mutualisms , in which both species benefit, or commensalisms , in which one species benefits and the other is unaffected.
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 ...
Ecology; Ecology addresses the full scale of life, from tiny bacteria to processes that span the entire planet. Ecologists study many diverse and complex relations among species, such as predation and pollination.
Some aquatic mammals, such as walrus, seal, sea lion, narwhals, beluga whales and killer whales, can store fat called blubber that they use to help keep warm in the icy waters. Some ungulates that live in frigid conditions often have pads under their hooves to help have a stronger tension on the icy ground or to help in climbing up on rocky ...
R.L. Nudds and S.A. Oswald argued in 2007 that there is poor empirical support for Allen's rule, even if it is an "established ecological tenet". [6] They said that the support for Allen's rule mainly draws from studies of single species, since studies of multiple species are "confounded" by the scaling effects of Bergmann's rule and ...
Insular biogeography [1] or island biogeography is a field within biogeography that examines the factors that affect the species richness and diversification of isolated natural communities.
In addition, pressure from natural selection is especially intense, as peripheral isolated populations exist at the outer edges of ecological tolerance. If most evolution happens in these rare instances of allopatric speciation then evidence of gradual evolution in the fossil record should be rare.