Geographical Variation in the Availability of Natural History Field Guides? Personal Reflections, Causes, and...

How animals obtain and eat their food is called foraging behavior. Foraging can include searching for plants and hunting for prey and depends on the species and environment.

Organisms that are well-adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. However, natural selection does not lead to perfectly adapted organisms. Several factors constrain natural selection.

To understand intra-specific interactions in populations, scientists measure the spatial arrangement of species individuals. This geographic arrangement is known as the species distribution or dispersion. Highly territorial species exhibit a uniform distribution pattern, in which individuals are spaced at relatively equal distances from one another. Species that are highly tied to particular resources, such as food or shelter, tend to concentrate around those resources, and thus exhibit a...

All organisms have a position within an ecosystem. The complete set of living and nonliving factors—including food resources, climate, and terrain—that define the position of a given organism are collectively referred to as the organism’s ecological niche.

Biodiversity describes the variety of living things at multiple organizational levels: genetic, species and ecosystem diversity. Species diversity includes all branches of the evolutionary tree from single-celled prokaryotic organisms, bacteria, and archaea, to the eukaryotic kingdoms: plants; animals; fungi; and protists. To date, there have been about 1.75 million species identified, and new species are discovered every week.

Natural selection is an evolutionary process in which individuals with survival-promoting traits reproduce at higher rates. These favorable traits become more common within a population or species. Naturally selected traits initially arise via random genetic mutations. In order for selection to occur, there must be variation within a population, the trait controlling the variation must be heritable, and there must be an evolutionary advantage for variation in the trait.