Sentences with phrase «niches for species»

Another mass extinction event will throw open a multitude of evolutionary niches for species to exploit, undoubtedly producing an exciting array of new species.

There could be three evolutionary processes could explain this adaptive radiation of hominins: 1) the occupation of novel niches for species living in a highly productive but spatially constrained region when there are deep fresh water lakes in the EARS [46] and 2) the lakes themselves creating spatial structure producing population isolation and vicariance and 3) repeated periods of increased resource availability stimulated adaptation and radiation followed by periods of environmental stress when the lakes rapidly dried up imposing strong selection pressures [28].

Not exact matches

Guilds are collections of species that occupy the same niche in an environment, and are a way for researchers to gauge biodiversity.

One positive finding of the ecological niche modelling study is that while the ranges of many species are expected to contract, much of the remaining suitable habitat for many species will be located within existing protected areas, and that the recent creation of new reserves such as Itombwe and Kabobo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have greatly increased the protection of some species under threat by future climate change.

One of the most popular explanations for species abundance holds that seemingly homogeneous habitats consist of many niches.

Every species, native or alien, must vie for limited niche space, like a game of musical chairs or like mailmen battling over access to a handful of mail slots.

The latest technique for making these predictions is so - called ecological niche modelling, in which researchers log the locations of known species sightings, then gather environmental data for those places to define the ecological limits of the species» range.

Our finding is broadly consistent with recent estimates for placental mammals -LSB-(100), but see SM12 (101)-RSB- and thus supports the hypothesis that the K - Pg transition was associated with a rapid species radiation caused by a release of ecological niches following the environmental destruction and species extinctions linked to an asteroid impact (2, 4, 5, 102).

«This is possibly one of the best examples of ecological speciation, that is the process by which selection generates new species, in the marine environment because the species evolved by adapting to different ecological niches, rather than by being separated by geographic barriers for a very long time,» says Paolo Momigliano, post-doctoral researcher from the Ecological Genetics Research Unit.

According to the competitive exclusion principle, no two species can occupy the same niche in the same environment for a long time.

But as Antarctic sea ice melts, minkes may find themselves with a smaller niche and suddenly competing for food with their larger cousins, spelling trouble for the species.

Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, who began to be interested in the role of cooperation in evolution since 2011, when he published a controversial paper titled «Evolution is a cooperative process: the biodiversity - related niches differentiation theory (BNDT) can explain» concluded: «These theoretical findings, confirmed by empirical approaches, should motivate our species to think before it is too late about how human competition, for the first time in the history of life on Earth, has been systematically leading to the extinction of animals and plants.

The East African cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi are ideal for investigating behavioral adaptation to environment, as within genera, fine - scale niche partitioning has resulted in sympatric sister species that live in definable microhabitats with distinct selection pressures.

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

This phenomenon, commonly called adaptive radiation, means that the original (homogeneous) species eventually divides into subspecies that can be very different in physical appearance - so - called phenotypic differences - because they have been selected for and adapted to different habitats or specific niches.

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.

Some species will be so disadvantaged they will go extinct and ecological niches will develop that offer opportunities for new species to arise.

If you're enticed by the opportunity to be responsible for new species, one suggests genetic engineering is more timely, and less costly than inducing catastrophe to create new niches or eliminate old denizens of current ones.