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Shelford's law of tolerance is a principle developed by American zoologist Victor Ernest Shelford in 1911. It states that an organism 's success is based on a complex set of conditions and that each organism has a certain minimum, maximum, and optimum environmental factor or combination of factors that determine success. [ 1 ]
All species have limits of tolerance to abiotic factors. Too much or too little of anything can lower their survival and reproductive success and cause reduced fitness. Changes in temperature resulting from global warming, for example, may cause a species to change its geographical distribution northward.
The basic ranks are species and genus. When an organism is given a species name it is assigned to a genus, and the genus name is part of the species name. The species name is also called a binomial, that is, a two-term name. For example, the zoological name for the human species is Homo sapiens. This is usually italicized in print or underlined ...
The pygmy mammoth is an example of insular dwarfism, a case of Foster's rule, its unusually small body size an adaptation to the limited resources of its island home.. A biological rule or biological law is a generalized law, principle, or rule of thumb formulated to describe patterns observed in living organisms.
A specialist species can thrive only in a narrow range of environmental conditions or has a limited diet. Most organisms do not all fit neatly into either group, however. Some species are highly specialized (the most extreme case being monophagous, eating one specific type of food ), others less so, and some can tolerate many different ...
Liebig's law has been extended to biological populations (and is commonly used in ecosystem modelling).For example, the growth of an organism such as a plant may be dependent on a number of different factors, such as sunlight or mineral nutrients (e.g., nitrate or phosphate).
In biological classification, class (Latin: classis) is a taxonomic rank, as well as a taxonomic unit, a taxon, in that rank. It is a group of related taxonomic orders. [a] Other well-known ranks in descending order of size are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, order, family, genus, and species, with class ranking between phylum and order. [1]
In evolutionary biology, an evolutionary tradeoff is a situation in which evolution cannot advance one part of a biological system without distressing another part of it. In this context, tradeoffs refer to the process through which a trait increases in fitness at the expense of decreased fitness in another trait.