DOES COEXISTENCE EQUAL COMPETITION?

Not necessarily and, in fact, maybe not usually, especially in the temperate zone.  In this first video in the series The Living World (which follows the AP Environmental Science curriculum), the construction of an ecological community is explored.  It begins by exploring the curious case of the Louisiana (above) and Northern waterthrushes, which despite being exceedingly similar in what they do and where they live, down to even nesting in the same upturned root of the same tree, do not exhibit any appreciable interspecific competition.  The issue is that there must be something to compete over, and in this case particularly food has been found to be in abundance. 

The video reviews the concept of the ecological niche and discusses the categories and components of the niche.  It further relates this concept to more typical pairs of species that, although related to each other, exhibit ecological differences that place them into separate niches.  It examines how species within a community can differ from one another along single and multiple resource axes. 

It also investigates how communities can change seasonally, with individual species changing their distributions and habitat use seasonally.  It concludes by exploring how communities are affected by habitat size, and discusses the species-area effect and what sorts of phenomena can lead to this effect.

As with other videos in this series, it is available through Arts and Academic Publishing- the publishing partner of Bird ConservationResearch, Inc.