ENV100Y5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Invasive Species, Cyanobacteria, Decomposer

• School: UTM
• Department: Environment
• Course: ENV100Y5
• Professor: Barbara Murck

Document Summary

Specialists = narrow niches and very specific requirements: generalists = broad niches that can use a wide array of habitats and resources. Competition: multiple organisms seek the same limited resources, intraspecific competition; interspecific competition, result: exclusion or coexistence, species divide shared resources by specializing in different ways, avoid competition. Effects of resource partitioning: character displacement: characteristics diverge to lessen competition, overlapping characteristics are selected against. Mutualists help one another: two or more species benefit from their interactions, symbiosis = mutualists live in close physical contact. Pollination - a type of mutualism exploitative interactions: predation = individuals capture, kill, and consume other individuals, parasitism = parasite depends on host for nourishment or other benefit, herbivory = animals feed on the tissues of plants. Coevolution: antagonistic species become locked in a duel of escalating adaptations, evolutionary arms race , red queen hypothesis. Ecological communities: community = interacting populations, community ecology = study of the patterns and processes of species interactions.