Palak Shah

TA: Luca

BIO 101

The niche is one of the most significant concepts in ecology. An organism’s niche is how it makes a living: the important resources it needs to survive and its ways of obtaining those resources.  Competition occurs when organisms in the same community look for the same limiting resource. This resource may be water, prey, nutrients, light, etc. Competition with members of the same species is intraspecific. Competition with individuals of different species is interspecific. Individuals experience both types of competition, but the relative importance of the two types of competition varies from population to population and species to species. Exploitation competition may cause the elimination of one species. For this to happen, one organism must require less of the limiting resource to survive. The dominant species must also reduce the quantity of that resource below some critical level where the other species would be unable to replace its numbers by reproduction. Exploitation will not always cause the elimination of one species. They may coexist with a decrease in their potential for growth. Neutralism is the most common type of interspecific interaction. Neither population affects one another nor are any interactions that do occur indirect or incidental. Amensalism is when one species suffers and the other interacting species experiences no effect at all. This is may be viewed as a very asymmetric form of competition. Mutualism is an interspecific interaction between two species, which benefits both members. Populations of each species grow, survive and may or may not reproduce at a higher rate in the presence of other species. Mutualisms are extensive in nature and occur between many different types of organisms. What kind of interspecific interaction takes place? How do two species interact with each other?

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Species that share the same habitat and have similar needs often use resources in different ways; so that they do not come into direct competition for part of the limiting resource which is called resource partitioning. Resource partitioning prevents competitive elimination so that the coexistence of several species using the same limiting resource.

In the lab, we did an experimental study of the interaction among two species of unicellular algae. Algae is just a general term for photosynthetic, aquatic organisms which are not vascular plants. Algae are predominantly unicellular or colonial organisms. They are predominantly eukaryotes, although cyanobacteria are ...

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This is an acceptable piece of work, but several small flaws prevent it from being really good. Firstly, it has not been proof read, and therefore suffers from silly errors and an inappropriately chatty tone. Secondly, it lacks a clear structure, particularly in the first outlining of the area. Thirdly, it would be vastly improved by the use of diagrams. Niches are the perfect topic in which to use simple Venn diagrams to clarify that one species might rely more heavily on a nutrient than another, or be better equipped to exploit it. Finally, the analysis of the experimental work done is extremely brief and shallow. It could be much longer and more detailed. At my (Russell group) university this piece of work would receive 3 stars.