BIOL 1070 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Character Displacement
12 Oct 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
A species has a range of tolerance to the environment. At the extremes of whatever you are measuring, very few individuals can survive, but in the intermediate, many survive. Assume now that the y axis is # of surviving species: now we look at the optimum community. More like a cloud, but easier to draw a box. Abiotic factors: fundamental niche: all the possible dimensions in which a species can survive in principle, temperature/precipitation, including seasonal changes, geography, landscape, soil. Biotic factors: realized niche: the dimensions in which a species actually survives after the effects of biotic interactions, dispersal ability, food availability. Competitive exclusion: one of the species disappears from that area. Character displacement: both species continue to co-exist, but the diverge to occupy slightly different ecological niches within the shared habitat: eg: one of them becomes nocturnal in order to avoid the other species.
