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For example, adaptive behavior is a mechanism of population stabilization. [23] In natural communities, organisms are able to interact with each other creating complex food webs and predator-prey dynamics. Adaptive behavior helps modulate the dynamics of feeding relationships by having a direct effect on their feeding traits and strategies. [23]
The adaptive traits may be structural, behavioural or physiological. Structural adaptations are physical features of an organism, such as shape, body covering, armament, and internal organization . Behavioural adaptations are inherited systems of behaviour, whether inherited in detail as instincts , or as a neuropsychological capacity for ...
Adaptive traits are those that produce more copies of the individual's genes in future generations. Maladaptive traits are those that leave fewer. For example, if a bird that can call more loudly attracts more mates, then a loud call is an adaptive trait for that species because a louder bird mates more frequently than less loud birds—thus ...
Birds' hearts and brains, which are very sensitive to arterial hypoxia, are more vascularized compared to those of mammals. [72] The bar-headed goose ( Anser indicus ) is an iconic high-flyer that surmounts the Himalayas during migration, [ 73 ] and serves as a model system for derived physiological adaptations for high-altitude flight.
The accumulation of certain traits may serve as "pre-conditions" for the evolution of eusociality to more likely occur in certain species. Eusociality is likely to be a trait arising from convergent evolution, considering the lack of evolutionary relationships between the species that have evolved eusociality.
However, a trait can have a current function that is adaptive without being an adaptation in this sense, if for instance the environment has changed. Imagine an environment in which having a small body suddenly conferred benefit on an organism when previously body size had had no effect on survival. [ 3 ]
Editor’s Note: Kottie Christie-Blick is a climate change education consultant, course instructor for the University of San Diego, California, and a mother.The views expressed in this commentary ...
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 ...