Intelligent Behavior Depends on the Ecological Niche

Learning the ecological niche.

A cornerstone of ecological theory is the ecological niche. Yet little is known about how individuals come to adopt it: whether it is innate or learned. Here, we report a cross-fostering experiment in the wild where we transferred eggs of blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, to nests of great tits, Parus major, and vice versa, to quantify the consequences of being reared in a different social contex...

Ecological niche

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, 37996 Knoxville, Tennessee 2 BIOSS, King’s Buildings, EH93JZ Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (email: [email protected]) 3 Center for Theoretical Study, Charles University, Jilská 1, 110 00-CZ Praha 1, Czech Republic (e-mail: [email protected]) 4 Department of Ecology. Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, 128 44-CZ...

Representations of the ecological niche

A formal theory of the ecological niche is indispensable not only for semantic precision in philosophy to understand and compare it with other meanings of niche, but also when computer scientists and ecologists desire to create interoperable software where one can retrieve the niche of a species and compare their parameters. The proposed model is a more fine-grained description of the ecologica...

Evolution of the Ecological Niche

Using ecological niche modeling to determine avian richness hotspots

Understanding distributions of wildlife species is a key step towards identifying biodiversity hotspots and designing effective conservation strategies. In this paper, the spatial pattern of diversity of birds in Golestan Province, Iran was estimated. Ecological niche modeling was used to determine distributions of 144 bird species across the province using a maximum entropy algorithm. Richness...