Niches

Interspecies Competition is one interaction between different species when you have two or more species needing the same resource

The term niche is a “catch-all” term that describes the role of an organism within an ecosystem. An organism’s niche includes its food, its predators, its habitat, and its effect on other organisms and the ecosystem.

For example, a raccoon’s niche would include…

Pair and Share: What’s your niche?

If more than one organism lives in the same area, they must have slightly different niches. Imagine that two different species require the same resource. Resource partitioning helps competing species share a resource and develop a niche for themselves in an ecosystem.

Example Let's say you have a healthy population of insects and you have bats and lizards that both want to eat the bugs. Since the bats fly and the lizards crawl on the ground, they could share the bugs with resource partitioning: The bats would eat the bugs they catch in the air, and the lizards would take care of the ones they could reach on the ground.

Resource partitioning – allows for different species to share the same resource. Each species is adapted for a section of that resource

How are resources partitioned in this food web?