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In behavioral ecology, adaptive behavior is any behavior that contributes directly or indirectly to an individual's reproductive success, and is thus subject to the forces of natural selection. [1] Examples include favoring kin in altruistic behaviors , sexual selection of the most fit mate, and defending a territory or harem from rivals.
Adaptive capacity confers resilience to perturbation, giving ecological and human social systems the ability to reconfigure themselves with minimum loss of function.In ecological systems, this resilience shows as net primary productivity and maintenance of biomass and biodiversity, and the stability of hydrological cycles.
Examples include searching for food, mating, and vocalizations. Physiological adaptations permit the organism to perform special functions such as making venom , secreting slime , and phototropism , but also involve more general functions such as growth and development , temperature regulation , ionic balance and other aspects of homeostasis .
In the life sciences the term adaptability is used variously. At one end of the spectrum, the ordinary meaning of the word suffices for understanding. At the other end, there is the term as introduced by Conrad, [3] referring to a particular information entropy measure of the biota of an ecosystem, or of any subsystem of the biota, such as a population of a single species, a single individual ...
Seminal examples of local adaptation come from plants that adapted to different elevations [10] or to tolerate heavy metals in soils. [11] Interactions among species (e.g. herbivore-plant interactions) can also drive local adaptation, though do not seem to be as important as abiotic factors, at least for plants in temperate ecosystems. [ 12 ]
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 ...
Acclimatization or acclimatisation (also called acclimation or acclimatation) is the process in which an individual organism adjusts to a change in its environment (such as a change in altitude, temperature, humidity, photoperiod, or pH), allowing it to maintain fitness across a range of environmental conditions.
Tropical or arctic microclimates, for example, would be ideal settings for experimentation, as annual temperature and weather can vary greatly. Additionally, laboratory settings could work with certain creatures that have defense mechanisms for certain environmental changes, such as Drosophila' s chill-coma adaptation.