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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 ]
A well-known example of a specialist animal is the monophagous koala, which subsists almost entirely on eucalyptus leaves. The raccoon is a generalist, because it has a natural range that includes most of North and Central America, and it is omnivorous, eating berries , insects such as butterflies, eggs, and various small animals.
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.
Species distribution, or species dispersion, [1] is the manner in which a biological taxon is spatially arranged. [2] The geographic limits of a particular taxon's distribution is its range , often represented as shaded areas on a map.
A number of factors determine how quickly any changes may occur in a species, but there is not always a desire to improve a species from its wild form. Domestication is a gradual process, so there is no precise moment in the history of a given species when it can be considered to have become fully domesticated.
Bergmann's rule - Penguins on the Earth (mass m, height h) [1] Bergmann's rule is an ecogeographical rule that states that, within a broadly distributed taxonomic clade, populations and species of larger size are found in colder environments, while populations and species of smaller size are found in warmer regions.
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature is the best known worldwide conservation status listing and ranking system. . Species are classified by the IUCN Red List into nine groups set through criteria such as rate of decline, population size, area of geographic distribution, and degree of population and distribution fragmenta
Using computer simulations, Colwell and Hurtt (1994) and Willing and Lyons (1998) first pointed out that if species’ latitudinal ranges were randomly shuffled within the geometric constraints of a bounded biogeographical domain (e.g. the continents of the New World, for terrestrial species), species' ranges would tend to overlap more toward the center of the domain than towards its limits ...