Niches and Competitive exclusion principle
What happens if two species try to occupy the same niche?
-Competition will result and only one will survive -One of the population will adapt to occupy a different niche and over time make a new species.
What is a niche?
A niche describes an organisms habitat, its role in the ecosystem, what it eats, what other resources it needs, what waste it produces and how it interacts with biotic and abitoic factors in the environment.
What is the competitive exclusion principle?
Many organisms can occupy the same habitat but only one species can occupy the same niche.
Examples of competitive exclusion?
one species gets a fundamnetal niche while the other lives in a realized niche
What is the realized niche?
the actual conditions it lives in
What is a fundamental niche?
the ideal niche that an organism would occupy if there was no competition