Competing species can share a habitat
- The idea
- Predict
- See it
- Why
- Check
The idea
“If two species compete for the same food, one of them has to drive the other out.”
Competition sounds like a fight that ends with a winner and a loser. In nature, two species often split what they share, and both stay.
The short version
The mistake: If two species compete for the same food, one of them has to drive the other out.
What's actually true: Competitors can coexist when their niches only partly overlap. Exclusion is expected when they need nearly the same resources.
- A niche is everything a species uses to live, like its food and space. Two species compete where their niches overlap.
- Competitive exclusion applies when two species share the same niche. The better competitor takes the shared resources, and the other dies out locally.
- With partial overlap, each species has resources the other rarely uses. Both can stay, usually at lower numbers than alone.
- Competitors often divide what they share, like feeding at different heights. That's resource partitioning.
On the exam: Exclusion needs nearly identical niches. If two competitors are both still there, ask how they split the food.