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A giant water bug attacking a fish. Insect ecology is the interaction of insects, individually or as a community, with the surrounding environment or ecosystem. [1] This interaction is mostly mediated by the secretion and detection of chemicals (semiochemical) in the environment by insects. [2]
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process.
[53] [55] This is to compensate for the low oxygen environment. This adaptation is associated with developmental patterns such as high birth weight, increased lung volumes, increased breathing, and higher resting metabolism. [56] [57] The genome of Tibetans provided the first clue to the molecular evolution of high-altitude adaptation in 2010. [58]
Desiccation tolerance refers to the ability of an organism to withstand or endure extreme dryness, or drought-like conditions.Plants and animals living in arid or periodically arid environments such as temporary streams or ponds may face the challenge of desiccation, therefore physiological or behavioral adaptations to withstand these periods are necessary to ensure survival.
This adaptation allows them to hide within their environment because of a resemblance to the general background or an inedible object. [2] When an insect looks like an inedible or inconsequential object in the environment that is of no interest to a predator, such as leaves and twigs, it is said to display mimesis, a form of crypsis.
With only 950,000 known non-insects, if the actual total number of insects is 5.5 million, they may represent over 80% of the total, and with only about 20,000 new species of all organisms being described each year, most insect species likely will remain undescribed, unless species descriptions greatly increase in rate.
Insect cooking oil, insect butter and fatty alcohols can be made from such insects as the superworm (Zophobas morio). [199] Insect species including the black soldier fly or the housefly in their maggot forms, and beetle larvae such as mealworms , can be processed and used as feed for farmed animals including chicken, fish and pigs. [ 200 ]
Ecophysiology (from Greek οἶκος, oikos, "house(hold)"; φύσις, physis, "nature, origin"; and -λογία, -logia), environmental physiology or physiological ecology is a biological discipline that studies the response of an organism's physiology to environmental conditions.