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Ecological niche. Appearance. The flightless dung beetle occupies an ecological niche: exploiting animal droppings as a food source. In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. [ 1 ][ 2 ] It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for example, by ...
Niche construction. Beavers hold a very specific biological niche in the ecosystem: constructing dams across river systems. Niche construction is the ecological process by which an organism alters its own (or another species') local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism’s environment, or it can encompass the ...
Competition (biology) Competition is an interaction between organisms or species in which both require a resource that is in limited supply (such as food, water, or territory). [1] Competition lowers the fitness of both organisms involved since the presence of one of the organisms always reduces the amount of the resource available to the other.
A benefit of a specialist species is that because the species has a more clearly defined niche, this reduces competition from other species. On the other hand, generalist species, by their nature, cannot realize as much resources from one niche, but instead find resources from many. Because other species can also be generalists, there is more ...
Realized niche width is a phrase relating to ecology, is defined by the actual space that an organism inhabits and the resources it can access as a result of limiting pressures from other species (e.g. superior competitors). An organism's ecological niche is determined by the biotic and abiotic factors that make up that specific ecosystem that ...
The two species share the same ecological niche, and are thus in competition with each other. Interspecific competition, in ecology, is a form of competition in which individuals of different species compete for the same resources in an ecosystem (e.g. food or living space). This can be contrasted with mutualism, a type of symbiosis.
Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within lineages. [1][2][3] Charles Darwin was the first to describe the role of natural selection in ...
t. e. In evolutionary biology, adaptive radiation is a process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environment makes new resources available, alters biotic interactions or opens new environmental niches. [1][2] Starting with a single ancestor, this ...