Sentences with phrase «ecological niche»

This diversity of geographical characteristics coupled with variable climatic conditions creates an incredible number of ecological niches for flora and fauna to occupy.

Birds have adapted to so many ecological niches in large part because of the variety of ways feathers lend them a competitive advantage.

Although an evolutionary innovation can open up new ecological niches, traits which are essentially beneficial can put species at a disadvantage in the context of rapid environmental changes.

Such fine - tuning would be different in different ecological niches.

One of the fundamental truths of community ecology is that it is difficult for two similar species to occupy the same ecological niche at the same time.

What these shifts provide is a wedge that opens up novel ecological niches, new possibilities for the search engine of evolution to explore.

Over time, you encounter more, and more varied, species, each with their own ecological niche.

Unlike the animals, we are not satisfied with living within a single ecological niche.

Alas for these majestic creatures, their narrow ecological niches were no match for human greed.

What seems to have happened in evolution is that every conceivable ecological niche gets occupied.

The science of ecological niches asks how a niche was changed by the introduction of a new animal, for example.

Humans have succeeded in large part because they are highly adaptable, and are not limited to small ecological niches subject to minor climatic variations.

Its members have adapted to the demands of a wide range of ecological niches, and many have developed highly specialized feeding habits.

Across the large lakes of this region, the hybrid population then diversified in a process known as «adaptive radiation» (evolution of multiple new species adapted to different ecological niches).

Other dinosaur groups failed to do this, got locked in to narrow ecological niches, and ultimately went extinct.

Several properties of ecological niche modelling in its usual application (i.e., predicting species» geographical ranges) are critically assessed, and some of these problems also apply here.

When humans went from mobile hunter / gatherer societies to sedentary villagers, they created a new ecological niche for neighboring wolves.

Every creature, regardless of whether it lives in water, on land, climbs trees, burrows in the mud, or wields an iPad, follows a dietary script written by many years of adaptation to life in a specific ecological niche on this planet.

About 250 million years ago, reptiles stepped up to fill ecological niches left vacant in the wake of one of Earth's biggest mass extinctions.

The authors point out that extreme sized animals tend to be found on islands because they fill ecological niches left unexploited by other organisms that never made it to the island.

Or the wild creatures exploited new ecological niches created by humans, gradually habituating themselves to people and, in essence, domesticating themselves.

«We think that modern humans, who occupied a similar ecological niche as Neanderthals, but with more evolved technology, in their colonization of the new European territories directly competed with Neanderthals for the food and other natural resources,» wrote Martínez - Navarro in an emailed response to Discovery News.

Many of these life forms thrived after the K - T event, and without the mass extinction to clear the way, they may not have found ecological niches to fill.

Marsupials have evolved in Australia several forms which occupy ecological niches held on other continents by placental mammals — wolf - like, squirrel - like, mole - like, woodchuck - like, etc..

He argued that in specific ecological niches, such as wetlands or hardwood forests, plant species that grow most rapidly come to dominate because they monopolize resources.

This in turn indicates that symbioses with ants break down when the plant partner begins to exploit ecological niches located at higher altitudes.

Our study demonstrates that high - throughput — based ancient DNA analyses combined with ecological niche modeling can provide evidence allowing us to assess factors that led to the surprisingly rapid demise of the passenger pigeon.

Targeting a seminal species in the food web commonly serves science by predicting potentially wide - ranging impacts on the entire ecological niche which depends upon that species for survival.

Based on external appearance, the researchers believe that this species dwells on the undersides of leaves, a unique ecological niche occupied by morphologically similar, closely related species.

The researchers uncovered a variety of features in the cichlid genome that enabled the fishes to thrive in new habitats and ecological niches within the Great Lakes of East Africa.

Axel Meyer at the University of Konstanz in Germany and his team say the fat - lipped fish occupy a different ecological niche from their thin - lipped cousins, despite living in the same lake, which fills a volcanic crater (BMC Biology, vol 8, p 60).

They used these location data to define each species» ecological niche based on four conditions: temperature, precipitation, elevation, and vegetation.

The students spent time hiking around the various ecological niches of Nevada, from the desert to Lake Tahoe.

This in turn, would have opened up more living space for marine animals, which then evolved into myriad forms to fill all the available ecological niches.

The gram - negatives bacteria classified into the genus Pseudomonas comprise a great variety of microorganisms inhabiting diverse ecological niches.

This suggests that the early forerunners to mammals diversified in the Triassic, branching out into multiple ecological niches that likely shaped later mammalian evolution.

Biodiversity can also be explored by investigating how species» traits evolve in close interaction with the environment, for example by analyzing ecological niches.

Therefore, Fischer says, many ecological niches were vacant and ready for evolution to fill them with new and interesting creatures.

The evolutionary history of the diapsid lineage is quite complex; diapsids evolved into many shapes, occupying many different ecological niches since they first came onto the scene in the late Carboniferous Period (roughly 350 million years ago), when they were represented by the earliest diapsid, the tiny lizardlike Petrolacosaurus.

Feminist utopian literature depicts these hidden communities in isolation from patriarchal civilization, which poses a threat to the creative and peaceful ecological niches imagined by women.

There are few ecological niches and crannies in the environment that sonic new denomination can not be designed to meet.

Like many species that flourished after the dinosaurs, these frogs may have opportunistically occupied ecological niches suddenly left vacant.

The fossil record shows that as species evolved to fill particular ecological niches, a few of the tetrapod clan lost limbs (snakes), turned arms into wings (bats, birds and pterosaurs) or decided the heck with dry land and headed back to sea (including whales, seals and some marine reptiles).

Their statistical tool, nicheROVER, is able to analyse multiple, customizable ecological niche parameters and identify the overlap between species.

«Even so, it took almost two million years before the deep sea food supply was fully restored as new species evolved to occupy ecological niches vacated by extinct forms.»

According to Shea, who specializes in ancient use of complex projectile weapons, «it's easy to imagine how complex projectile technology may have led humans to gain a broad and resilient human ecological niche.»

Using data from several sources on 162 terrestrial animals and plants unique (endemic) to the Albertine Rift, the researchers used ecological niche modeling (computer models) to determine the extent of habitat already lost due to agriculture, and to estimate the future loss of habitat as a result of climate change.

Exactly why bony fish managed to prevail in different habitats is the subject of debate: Do they have a better body plan, which is suited to more ecological niches than that of the cartilaginous fish?