It's Not Just a Game Anymore
This lesson focuses on community ecology, meaning that we will learn about how different populations interact with each other in an environment in order to survive.
What is a niche?
Organisms occupy all sorts of spaces, with the physical space they live in being known as their habitat, but what happens when more than one organism lives in the same habitat? These organisms are now forced to compete for important resources like food, water, space, and mates. In many cases, instead of competing directly with another organism for the same resources, organisms will adapt to their environment, creating their own niche, meaning they utilize specific resources that are not going to produce direct competition with another organism.
What is competition?
Competition in nature occurs when two or more organisms need to utilize the same limiting resource. Because there is only so much of a limiting resource to go around, eventually the competition will result in one organism winning, which means the other organisms that were in the competition were unable to survive.
The competitive exclusion principle
The competitive exclusion principle states that no two organisms can occupy the exact same niche at the same time. If two organisms try to occupy the same niche, they are competing directly for the exact same limiting resources. Eventually one of the organisms will out compete the other for the resources which would either force the other organism to find another niche to survive or die due to it's inability to obtain resources.