4: Adaptations to the Physical Environment
- Page ID
- 78171
- Describe what an adaptation is and how it arises, and explain examples of common adaptations in plants and animals.
- Compare and contrast some of the broad strategies organisms employ to deal with a variable environment.
- Explain how individual physiological performance can vary with the environment, and link these concepts with population distribution limits and climate change.
- 4.1: What is adaptation?
- An adaptation is a heritable trait that has evolved through natural selection. Adaptation is closely related to biological fitness, which governs the rate of evolution as measured by change in gene frequencies. Often, two or more species co-adapt and co-evolve as they develop adaptations that interlock with those of the other species, such as with flowering plants and pollinating insects.
- 4.2: Strategies for dealing with a changing environment
- Many adaptations allow organisms to contend with changes in their environment. Two broad strategies for dealing with change are to conform or regulate. Conforming is when an organism allows their internal environment to fluctuate with the external environment. Regulating is when an organism attempts to regulate or maintain a constant internal environment despite any environmental fluctuations. Both approaches have procs and cons, leading to the diversity of organisms we see on earth.
- 4.4: Physiological optima and critical limits
- An adaptation is a trait that has evolved through via natural selection, and maintains or increases the fitness of an organism under a given set of environmental conditions. This concept is central to ecology: the study of adaptation is the study of the evolutionary relationship between organisms and their environment.
In biology, adaptation is defined a heritable behavioral, morphological, or physiological trait that has evolved through the process of natural selection, and maintains or increases the fitness of an organism under a given set of environmental conditions. This concept is central to ecology: the study of adaptation is the study of the evolutionary relationship between organisms and their environment. While different groups of plants and animals have adapted to components of their environment in many different ways, more broadly, the two basic solutions for dealing with environmental variation are to conform to the environment or to regulate internal conditions despite the environment. These different strategies influence an organism's physiological performance across variable environmental conditions.