Good day every one im ALYSAJANE BENDOY and today were going to tackle about competition. Kindly
open your book on page 222.
COMPETITION
Imagine a garden. If not taken care of, the plants will go through competition. Competition is a
biological interaction between or among the same or different organisms where the organisms fight for
resources. Competition occurs when two species each require a resource that is in short supply, so that
the availability of the resource to one species is negatively influenced by the presence of the other
species.
Weeds are among the most common garden pests as they compete for nutrients and space. If not
controlled, weeds will eventually take over the entire garden. As a result, as the population density of
weeds and garden plants increases, competition for limited resources may slow population growth.
If two species compete for the same limited resources, one or both populations' growth may be
hampered. This is called interspecific competition.For example, predators of different species might
compete for the same prey.
What is Interspecific Competition?
Interspecific competition is the competition for food, habitat and other needs between two or more
species of organisms. Thus, many species involved in interspecific competition. This type of competition
is known as direct competition. That is, the two species fight directly to fulfil their requirements over the
other species. In direct competition, one species aims in the destruction of the other species by direct
killing or attack. Thus, some plants secrete harmful chemicals, which could kill the growth of other
species of plants. The second aspect of interspecific competition is the indirect method that involves
exploitation. In this regard, one species will exploit and destroy all the available resources, so that it will
not be available for the other species. In this manner, the resources are eliminated which indirectly
causes the removal of one particular species over the other species.
(ituturo)
this picture is an example of interspecific competition.
Georgii F. Gause the Russian ecologist studied the effects od interspecific competition by conducting
experiments on two species of PARAMECIUM.
PARAMECIUM is A unicellular, freshwater animal with a distinguishing shoe-like shape.
The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can
be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available.
The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology
corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the
number of birth.
the competitive exclusion principle,[1] sometimes referred to as Gause's law is a proposition that two
species which compete for the same limited resource cannot coexist at constant population values.
When one species has even the slightest advantage over another, the one with the advantage will
dominate in the long term. This leads either to the extinction of the weaker competitor or to an
evolutionary or behavioral shift toward a different ecological niche.
the term “niche” describes the role an organism plays in a community. A species’ niche encompasses
both the physical and environmental conditions it requires (like temperature or terrain) and the
interactions it has with other species (like predation or competition).
AND LASTLY the Resource partitioning
When species competing for the same resources evolve more specialized traits that allow them to use
shared resources at different times, in different ways or in different places
take a look at figure 12-12.
this is the resource partitioning in warbler bird species
Due to competition, each species uses less of the niche than they are capable of using.