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Chapter 4: Adaptations to the Physical Environment

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    Learning Objectives
    • 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.

    Summary

    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 is 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.

    Contributors and Attributions

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    Chapter 4: Adaptations to the Physical Environment is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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