CompetitionSpringer Science & Business Media, 6 дек. 2012 г. - Всего страниц: 552 Competition is one of the most important factors controlling the distribution and abundance of living creatures. Sperm cells racing up reproductive tracts, beetle larvae battling inside single seeds, birds defending territories, and trees interfering with the light available to neighbours, are all engaged in competition for limited resources. Along with predation and mutualism, competition is one of the three major biological forces that assemble living communities. Recent experimental work, much of it only from the last few decades, has enhanced human knowledge of the prevalence of competition in nature. There are acacia trees that use ants to damage vines, beetles that compete in arenas for access to dung balls, tadpoles that apparently poison their neighbours, birds that smash the eggs of potential competitors, and plants that associate with fungi in order to increase access to soil resources. While intended as an up-to-date reference work on the state of this branch of ecology, the many non-technical examples will make interesting reading for those with a general interest in nature. Greatly expanded from the first prize-winning edition, there are entirely new chapters, including one on resources and another on competition gradients in nature. The author freely ranges across all major taxonomic groups in search of evidence. The question of whether competition occurs is no longer useful, the author maintains; rather the challenge is to determine when and where each kind of competition is important in natural systems. For this reason, variants of competition such as intensity, asymmetry and hierarchies are singled out for particular attention. The book concludes with the difficulties of finding general principles in complex ecological communities, and illustrates the limitations on knowledge that arise out of the biased conduct of scientists themselves. Competition can be found elsewhere in living systems other than ecological communities, at sub-microscopic scales in the interactions of enzymes and neural pathways, and over large geographic areas in the spread of human populations and contrasting ideas about the world. Human societies are therefore also examined for evidence of the kinds of competition found among other living organisms. Using an array of historical examples, including Biblical conflicts, the use of noblemen's sons in the Crusades, the Viking raids in Europe, strategic bombing campaigns in the Second World War, and ethnic battles of the Balkans, the book illustrates how most of the aspects of competition illustrated with plants and animals can be extended to the interactions of human beings and their societies. |
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... competitors, came to be known as Gause's principle or law" (McIntosh, 1985, p. 180). But the use of the term struggleforexistence remained misleading since it confounded the effects of neighbours with those of the physical environment ...
... competitors upon one another; (4) the resources that are the basis of the interaction. The fourth category, resources, will be left until Chapter 2, resources being important enough to deserve a chapter of their own. 1.4.1 Mechanism One ...
... at a severe disadvantage, since not only does the quality of the cadaverdecline with time, due to effects of climate and micro-organisms, but it is increasingly likely to be occupied by potential predators and competitors 14 Chapter 1.
P.A. Keddy. increasingly likely to be occupied by potential predators and competitors (Crowson, 1981). There are thus many parallels between dung and carrion COnSUlmerS. In such situations we can postulate that there has been strong ...
... competitors. Further, removal experiments require on-going effort, since neighbouring individuals will often rapidly ... competitor will tend to reveal diffuse competition, whereas a strong one will tend to reveal monopolism, since there ...
Содержание
Chapter 2 Resources | 60 |
Chapter 3 Competition in action | 121 |
Chapter 4 Choosing the tools | 152 |
Chapter 5 Competitive hierarchies | 203 |
Chapter 6 Traits and competitive performance | 241 |
Chapter 7 Competition gradients | 281 |
Chapter 8 Extending the generality of field experiments | 317 |
Chapter 9 Modelling competition | 333 |
Chapter 10 Competition pragmatism and comparison | 405 |
Chapter 11 Goals and obstacles in the study of competition | 457 |
References | 487 |
Index | 535 |
Population and Community Biology Series | 553 |