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competition and predation

  • Competition: one wins, one loses 
  • Could be energy, food, mates, money, whatever
  • Competitive exclusion principle: only one winner (assumes a limited resource)
  • This impacts evolution: if there is overlap between two competitors for a limited resource, natural selection will favor the ones that don't overlap, since they don't have to compete for those resources:

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This is called Resource partitioning (biologists love words like this)
Note that the two curves separate...


Predator-prey and other fun stuff:
  • Predation: one lives, one dies, example lion eats a zebra
  • Parasitism: one lives, other lives off of them (bad manners to kill the host), example worms
  • Mutualism: both win, example Egrets on back of horses or cows: egrets eat bugs, horse protects the egrets from ground predators
  • Commensalism: one wins, the other does not care, example orchids growing on branches
  • Herbivory: only plants die (e.g. cows)

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