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HABITAT & NICHE
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE 1

HABITAT AND NICHE CONCEPTS AND EXAMPLES
HABITAT: is the home of or the area where an organism lives. NICHE: Is the role an organism plays within itsenvironment. Interactions with other organisms: feeding, roosting and breeding habits; and timing of activities are a few of the many things used to describe an organism’s niche. Two similar species cannot occupy the same niche during the same time. This is called Competitive exclusion .This is why lions and tigers do not occupy the same habitat as one another. Because they both have the same niche.Abington Island Case Abington is an island in the South Atlantic that had an indigenous species of turtle. During the 19th century, sailors introduced goats to island. The goats had exactly the samerequirements as the turtles for food. Therefore there was a s trong c om petition, which led to the extinction of one of the species, in this case the turtles.

EXAMPLES

In the arctic regions wefind the arctic fox which, among other things, subsists upon the eggs of guillemots (a bird), while in winter it relies partly on the remains of seals killed by polar bears. Turning to tropicalAfrica, we find that the spotted hyena destroys large numbers of ostrich eggs, and also lives largely upon the remains of zebras killed by lions. The arctic fox and the hyena thus occupy the same twoniches but in different habitats. Short-lived animals, for example insects, can occupy the same niche in the same habitat and avoid competition by pursuing their activities during different seasons. Inspecies found in the same area for example Giraffe, Thompson’s gazelles and wildebeests on East Africa, they avoid competition for food in such way that giraffe, with its long neck feed high up with treeleaves; the gazelle and wildebeest, although of similar stature eat differently: the gazelle eats ground-hugging leaves, while the wildebeest eats side shoots.

The ecological niche of The...