Ecological Conditions

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Ecological Conditions
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Conditions

• An abiotic factor that influences the immediate
  survival of an organism temperature, humidity,
  pH, salinity, wind velocity, current flow, soil,
  pollutants, etc.

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Law of the Minimum

• The distribution of a species will be controlled
  by that environmental factor for which the
  organism has the narrowest range of adaptability
  or control.
• - Carl Sprengel 1828

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Bullfrog Ectotherm an organism which relies
on external sources of heat to regulate its body
temperature
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Hippopotamus Endotherm an organism which is
able to generate heat within its body in order to
elevate its body temperature.
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Bullfrog Ecto- or Endotherm?
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Jack-in-the-pulpit Ectotherm or Endotherm?
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Colorado Potato Beetle
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Day-Degrees in Invert Development

• Pieris rapae
• Cabbage white moth

• Austroicetes cruciata Australian plague
  grasshopper

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Atlantic Puffin in Iceland
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Acclimatization

• The habituation of an organism's physiological
  response to environmental conditions - usually
  occurs gradually over a certain length of time.

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Plant Cooling by Transpiration
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Antarctic toothfish
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Red-Osier Dogwood
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Amazonian rain forest distribution today and rain
forest refuges during last glacial period
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Margaret B. Davis,Mother of Paleoecology
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Changes in Oak and Spruce distributions
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Summary of the effects of conditions on species
distributions

• Lethal conditions may limit distributions but
  they only need to occur occasionally in order to
  do so.

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Saguaro cactus in snow
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Summary of the effects of conditions on species
distributions

• Distributions are more often limited by
  conditions that are regularly suboptimal (rather
  than lethal) leading to a reduction in growth or
  reproduction or increased chance of mortality.

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Summary of the effects of conditions on species
distributions

• Suboptimal conditions often act by altering the
  outcome of a biological interaction between the
  species of interest and other species.

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St. JohnsWort aka Klamath weed
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Chrysolina Beetles on St. Johns Wort
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Summary of the effects of conditions on species
distributions

• Suboptimal conditions often interact with other
  conditions so that it is often impossible to
  locate a single condition as the most important
  factor.

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Mediterranean fruit fly
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Summary of the effects of conditions on species
distributions

• Suboptimal conditions are often moderated by the
  evolutionary, physiological and behavioral
  responses of the organisms.

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Kangaroo Rat
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Summary of the effects of conditions on species
distributions

• Towards the edge of a species range, it occupies
  patches in which conditions are closest to those
  found in the center of its range.

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Rufous grasshopper