Community Ecology: Feel the Love - Crash Course Ecology #4

Key Takeaways

I wouldn't be much of a teacher if I didn't tell you that life is tough and that everyone's looking out for themselves in this world it's just the way it is people you know I always say that biology is ultimately about sex and not dying well both of those things are more difficult than we'd like them to be because of competition there's a finite amount of resources on the planet so Evolution drives us to compete for them so that we can survive long enough to spread our genes all over the place and naturally competition is a really important part of how different species interact when their habitats overlap these interactions between spe are what define ecological communities so it makes sense that Community ecology studies these interactions anywhere they take place from a tide poool to the whole ocean from a rotting log to an entire Forest but just because inter species interaction is mostly competitive doesn't necessarily mean that Community ecology is all about big bloody tooth and Claw scenes like from cable TV nature shows actually a lot of it is but we're not going to get there until next week for now let's just note the competition while prevalent and important is also pretty dangerous kind of a hassle and can like really hurt so a lot of inner species interaction is actually about sidest stepping direct competition and instead finding ways to divvy up resources or otherwise let species just get along Can You Feel The [Music] Love careful guys cuz right now we are surrounded by potentially lethal interspecific competition going on all over the place since we're animals we usually think of competition as going on between animals but really it happens between almost all members of the four Kingdoms of Life whenever species compete they're going after the same resources that they need for their survival and continued population growth and this Garden the weeds are competing with the sunflower and the corn and the dill for the nutrients and water in the soil so these resources because they're finite in this area are the limiting factors that we've talked about the population can only get as big as these factors will allow now particularly nasty weed could would over time eliminate the veggies entirely such elimination is known as competitive exclusion and it's one of the most fundamental properties in community ecology and also like life because the fact is when two species are competing for the same resources one of them is eventually going to be more successful and eliminate the other This Bitter truth is known as the competitive exclusion principle and it was first identified in 1934 by Russian ecologist GF Goss and a study of two closely related species of microscopic protests when he was only 22 years old Gau made name for himself by conducting experiments that pitted one species of protest parium aelia against another parium called datum first gos grew each species separately with the exact same resources and found that each developed rapidly and established stable populations but when he grew them in the same container P called datam was soon driven to extinction by P aelia parium aelia gained a competitive Advantage because its population grew slightly faster than pams so goss's experiment showed that in the absence of another disturbance two species that require the same resources cannot live indefinitely in the same habitat the inferior competitor will be eliminated makes sense but if competitive exclusion is the natural law of the land then why isn't all of Earth just a crazy crap circus of constant competition predation and ultimately Extinction of all those losers well for a couple of reasons first not all resources are limiting two species of sharks May compete for water in the ocean but the ocean is you know gigantic so that's not what limits their population growth rather the amount of food like a specific fish that they both eat could be limiting while other resources are plentiful second as the overwhelming diversity of life in almost any Community shows us most species even ones that are almost identical to each other are adaptable enough to find a way to survive in the face of competition they do this by finding an ecological niche the sum of all resources both biotic and abiotic that is species uses in its environment you could think of an organism's niche as its job in the community that provides it with a certain life lifestyle we tend to keep jobs that we could do better than anyone else in our community and if we're desperate we do a job that nobody else wants to do but no matter what job we have what it pays in terms of resources dictates our lifestyle so finding a nice comfy Niche that you have pretty much to yourself not only provides a steady income of food and other stuff it also allows the species to avoid competitive exclusion and this in turn helps create a more stable ecological Community it's an elegant and peaceful solution I I wish that we humans could figure out something as good good but as with anything in life this relative security and stability comes at a price the bummer is that it prevents some species from living the lifestyle that they could have if nobody else competed with them at all this ideal situation is called a fundamental Niche and it's just that an ideal few if any species ever get to live that way instead because of the need to avoid competitive exclusion in order to survive many species end up with a different job and hence lifestyle it's not necessarily the job that they studied for in college but it makes a decent living and that's called a real Niche this my friends is how nature does conflict management but it sounds kind of unnatural doesn't it I mean Goss taught us that competition and winning the competition was the natural order of things so how could it be that part of the natural order actually involves letting everyone compete and win just a little bit and how did we ever come to discover that things actually work this way well it took a special kind of person and to tell you about them I'm going to need a special kind of chair [Music] Canadian born ecologist Robert MacArthur was in his late 20s when he made a discovery that made him one of the most influential ecologists of the 20th century while researching his doctoral thesis at Yale University in 1958 he was studying five species of Warblers that live in coniferous forests in the northeastern United States at the time because there were so many different species of Warblers that lived fed and mated in such Close Quarters many ornithologists thought that the birds occupi the exact same Niche and thus were an exception to goss's competitive Exclusion Principle but MacArthur was not convinced a mathematician by training he set out to measure exactly how and where each kind of warbler did its foraging nesting and mating in order to do this he studied each tree the birds lived in dividing them into zones 16 zones to be exact from bare lyen at the base of the trunk to new needles and buds at the tips of the branches after many seasons of observing many birds in many trees he found that each species of warbler divided its time differently among the various parts of the tree Juan warbler called the Cape May for example spent most of its time toward the outside of the tree at the top meanwhile the bay breasted fed mostly around the middle interior MacArthur also found that each of the warboys had different hunting and foraging habits and even bred it slightly different times of the year so that their highest food requirements didn't overlap these differences Illustrated how the war Bor partitioned their limiting resources each finding its realized Niche that allowed it to escape the fate of competitive exclusion the phenomenon he observed is now known as resource partitioning when similar species settle into separate niches that let them coexist thanks in part to this discovery MacArthur became known as a pioneer of modern ecology encouraging curiosity and hypothesis-driven research championing the use of genetics and ecological study and collaborating with biologists like IO Wilson and Jared Diamond sadly he died of renal cancer at the age of 42 but his study of Northern warblers remains a classic example of community ecology that is still taught today so if organisms can do this if they can behave in ways that help minimize competition while increasing their odds for survival it follows that traits associated with this Behavior would start being selected favorably after all that's what natural selection is for when this happens it's known as character displacement to demonstrate let's go back to some other famous ecologists our favorite couple of evolutionary biologists and love birds Peter and rosemary Grant I told you before about how they observed the process of speciation among Darwin's famous Galapagos well on the same island Daphne major in 2006 they witnessed character displacement in action for a long time a small population of finches had the island to themselves where they ate a variety of seeds including seeds of the fever plant which were bigger and more nutritious than the smaller seeds that were available but were harder for the little finches to open then in 1982 a group of much bigger finches showed up on the island and they began to commandeer the Island's abundant supply of fever plant seeds within just 20 years the grants found that these small finches beaks shrunk to allow them to specialize in eating only these smaller less nutritious seeds but now the little finches had those seeds all to themselves the traits of the two populations had actually diverged to help facilitate the partitioning of resources see competition can be hard on us but it can also make us better people or you know finches war bors or Kangaroo Mice but there are also kinds of in species interaction where species actually join forces in the fight for survival this is the ultimate in Conflict avoidance in these cases species in a community actually manage to avoid competition altogether by forming downright type relationships that benefit one if not both of the parties involved you may have heard of both of these cases first mutualism where both species benefit and commensalism where one species benefits and the other is kind of like whatever mutualism abounds in nature and for those who've been paying attention to crash course you've heard me talk about it many many times before a prime example are microa the fungal roots that we talked about a few weeks ago where fungi and plant roots get entangled and essentially rub each other's backs for nutritious favors others you may have heard about include flowering plants that produce nectar to attract pollinators and that bear fruit to attract animals to help spread the seeds inside often times these relationships become rather needy like in the case of termites they can't break down the cellulous and the wood they eat without the enzymes produced by the microorganisms that live inside their digestive systems without the Little Critters the bigger Critters would die such a needy relationship is called obligate mutualism by contrast commensalism is where one species definitely benefits and the other isn't really hurt or helped such neutrality of course is difficult to prove because even a seemingly benign interaction probably has some effect barnacles for example hitchhike on grey whales getting a free ride through swaths of planked and Rich water for feeding while clearly a benefit to the Barnacles the relationship is often considered commensal because the whales probably don't really care whether the Barnacles are there or not or do they the Barnacles might slow down the whale as it swims through the water but on the other hand they might also serve as a type of camouflage from predators like or in which case they confer an advantage so it probably comes down to me for the whale and when you consider all the other possibilities out there when species interact me isn't such a bad option especially considering that next week we're going for the throat by which I mean we'll be investigating the kill or be killed world of animal predation and all of the Fantastic evolutionary changes it can trigger that lead to even greater diversity in ecological communities there probably is going to be a lot of blood though so you might want to bring your Poncho thank you for watching this episode of Crash Cory ol ology if you want to review anything there's a table of contents over here for you to click on any of the parts that you may want to review much love and appreciation to all the people who helped us put this episode together and if you have any questions or comments or ideas you can leave them for us on Facebook or Twitter or of course down in the comments below