Every organism has a unique ecosystem within which it lives. This ecosystem is its natural habitat. This is where the basic needs of the organism to survive are met: food, water, shelter from the weather and place to breed its young. All organisms need to adapt to their habitat to be able to survive. Show This means adapting to be able to survive the climatic conditions of the ecosystem, predators, and other species that compete for the same food and space. An adaptation is a modification or change in the organism's body or behaviour that helps it to survive. Explore the links given here to know more about habitats and how different plants and animals. An animal may adapt to its habitat in different ways. It may be a physical or structural adaptation, just as the limbs of birds have modified into wings or the way the cheetah is shaped for running at a fast speed. It may be in the way the body works in circulating and respiration, for instance the gills that fish have enable them to breathe in water. Or it may be the way the animal behaves whether it is hunting for food, or running fast to avoid predators or migrating to other places for food or survival. To know more about different types of adaptations visit the link. An animal's environment consists of many different things. The climate, the kinds of food plants that grow in it, other animals that may be predators or competitors- the animal must learn to adapt to each of these factors in order to survive. With increasing population growth and human activity that disturbs the natural habitat, animals must learn to adapt to these kind of threats as well. Animals in the wild can only live in places they are adapted to. They must have the right kind of habitat where they can find the food and space they need. Visit the link for a brief overview of how animals adapt to their habitat. Did you know that animals camouflage themselves so they can adapt to their environment? Adaptation can protect animals from predators or from harsh weather. Many birds can hide in the tall grass and weeds and insects can change their colour to blend into the surroundings. This makes it difficult for predators to seek them out for food. Some animals, like the apple snail, can survive in different ecosystems- from swamps, ditches and ponds to lakes and rivers. It has a lung/gills combination that reflects its adaptation to habitats with oxygen poor water. This is often the case in swamps and shallow waters. To know more about how the apple snail can survive in different habitats visit the link. In the harsh cold climate of Alaska, the animals have learnt to adapt to the weather by storing food in their body and protecting themselves from the cold with thick furs. Human inhabitants in Alaska have also learnt to cope with the environment by building shelters that insulate and hold the heat, and yet do not allow the structure to melt. To know more about this go to this website.
This chapter discusses the adaption of organisms to environment. Adaptation is the fitness of an organism for its environment. The environment consists of the surroundings in which organisms live and is physical and living. Environments are either terrestrial or aquatic. Aquatic environments are either fresh water or
marine. Different places in which organisms live in the major environments are called habitats. Adaptations to environment are the means used by an organism to obtain food and energy in its particular habitat. Living things adapt themselves not only to their physical environment but also to their living environment, that is, they must adapt themselves to other plants and animals living around them. Energy supplied to the various species of any plant and animal community comes from the sun
through photosynthesis in the green plant. Some of the energy is passed successively as food from species to species-as the food pyramid is ascended. Copyright © 1966 The Nuclear Science Foundation within the University of Sydney. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Video transcript- [Dr. Samuel] Hi everybody, Dr. Samuel here, your friendly neighborhood entomologist. And I was hoping that we could take a few minutes to talk about adaptation. What comes to mind when you think about adaptation? You might think of cryptic morphology that helps organisms hide from predators, scaly armor or spines to protect organisms in a scuffle, or increased melanin pigmentation in the skin to shield an organism from the damaging impacts of harsh sunlight in really sunny areas. And if this is the sort of thing that you thought of, you're right, these are all adaptations. But what people often miss about adaptations is that they all help organisms survive and reproduce in a particular environment. The word adaptation can refer to a trait that makes an organism more suited to its environment. But it can also mean the process by which a population becomes dominated by organisms that are suited to their environment. The point is that adaptation happens in a population as its organisms accumulate adaptations. And this all happens through the process of natural selection, which you may have heard about. With natural selection, we see organisms with beneficial heritable traits, increasing their share of the gene pool in the population because they're more likely to mate and produce offspring. This means these well-adapted organisms have higher fitness, a measure of an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its specific environment. These traits or adaptations make the organisms better suited to survive and reproduce because they're better suited to the specific environmental context that they live in. That is our green caterpillars blend in, and thus, survive better on the green leaves, and the orange caterpillars on the orange leaves. As you can see, natural selection is intimately intertwined with the environment in which it takes place. And this is why natural selection can lead to adaptation. Even the concept of adaptation is diverse. Adaptations can be anatomical, changes to physical structures, or physiological, changes in the function of these structures, or adaptations can be changes to behavior. We see this with honeybees adapted to life in Africa, sometimes called by the suboptimal names, Africanized honeybees or killer bees. They're the same species as and look identical too. Populations of honeybees adapted to North America, but their behaviors diverge dramatically. Because the African populations are adapted to life in a hot, tropical environment, sometimes, they construct nests right out in the open air, nests in open air. This is extremely rare for populations adapted to the temperate climate of North America, where the temperature range is far too broad between winter and summer for open air nests to be successful. So, North American honeybee populations much prefer to live inside of protected structures like inside of the trunks of hollow trees or the boxes that beekeepers provide, nests in protected structures. And in Africa, there are also more large, fearsome predators interested in getting into the bees' nest. So, the frequency of traits related to hyper defensiveness is much more common than in populations adapted to North America, where there are fewer aggressive predators, heightened defensiveness, low to moderate defensiveness. The success of honeybees adapted to life in Africa left a lot of people worried that they would be similarly successful in North America and replace the honeybees there. But those concerns ignored the connection between adaptation and the environment. Traits that helped those bees survive in Africa and even helped them in similar environments found in many regions of tropical, South and Central America, well, those same exact traits were liabilities in much of North America. Okay, so, this is all fascinating, but you may be wondering, if natural selection is passing out adaptations, why doesn't it choose better stuff? Fish tend to get eaten by birds and bears a lot. And that's gone on for literally millions of years. So, why I haven't fish populations developed something like laser eyes or teleportation? Instead, when a population of fish does evolve defense, it's typically something like a few bones, that it already has, getting longer and sharper and protruding out of their fins, like in the case of the three-spined stickleback fish. These spines protect the stickleback from birds and other predators, but only if the spines are long enough to make it difficult for that specific predator to swallow them. Birds with wider throats are still able to eat even fully grown fish with fully elongated spines. Laser eyes really do seem like they would be more effective. It's almost like natural selection is just tinkering with whatever it has lying around instead of going out and buying something new and perfectly suited to the task. And that is exactly what's happening. Populations don't adapt by accessing a bottomless well of awesome problem-solving options. Quite the contrary, with natural selection as the driver, adaptations can be pretty limited. You might already be tracking with the idea that if an increase in fitness is what natural selection is after, you don't need an adaptation that allows you to incinerate all of your enemies. You just need one good enough to solve whatever problem is keeping others in your population from surviving in mating. If that's a kingfisher bird eating the other fish, the resolution might be just a spine that's only a half a centimeter longer than the other fishes. That's the reason why we see adaptations that look like natural selection just grabbed whatever happened to be lying around and modified it because it kinda did. A turtle's remarkably protective shell may look fancy and novel, but it's literally the turtle's overgrown ribs fused with its spine. A narwhal's face spear, that there is just a tooth that grew all the way out of its face. Natural selection only has the options currently in the genes of a population with the occasional addition of new genetic sequences through mutation to work with when a problem arises. And you might be thinking, "Oh great! Mutations, those will help! That's how my favorite superhero got her powers." Well, unlike what we see in movies, most mutations either have no real effect or result in problematic gene expression or nonfunctional proteins which is pretty bad news for living things. So, adaptations are not likely to be super weapons that ensure survival in all circumstances. Instead, they're useful traits that help increase an organism's fitness as the environmental conditions apply pressure. So, adaptation is a remarkable system, but one with some pretty pronounced limitations. Natural selection has to work with what an organism has. But consider for a moment what it has given us despite those limitations. Pistol shrimp have the ability to slam their claws shut so quickly that the water around them collapses in on itself. It implodes knocking nearby fish unconscious. Some honeybees can bundle together and vibrate their flight muscles so rapidly that they can create a biological convection oven which can cook predators to death. And there are parasitic wasps that have evolved to live inside of parasitic wasps that live inside of parasitic wasps that live inside of caterpillars, like tiny, strange, little Russian nesting dolls. And don't even get me started on the hornets that have yellow patches on their abdomen that absorb solar energy to supplement the energy provided by their diet. They have solar panels! I'd say natural selection has done pretty well for itself. What adaptation does the organisms have that makes it well suited for its environment?The idea of natural selection is that traits that can be passed down allow organisms to adapt to the environment better than other organisms of the same species. This enables better survival and reproduction compared with other members of the species, leading to evolution.
What are 2 examples of adaptations that helps organisms survive in their environment?Webbed feet, sharp claws, beak type, wings for flying, feathers, fur, scales, spines, thorns, or types of leaves, can all help organisms survive in an environment.
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What adaptation does the organism have that makes it well suited for its environment?
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