Interspecific Competition In A Biological Community

A biological community is all the populations of organisms living together and potentially interacting in a particular area. A community has its own properties, just as a population has certain characteristics, such as density and dispersion pattern. Its defining characteristics are its diversity, its prevalent from of vegetation, its stability, and its trophic structure. The variety of different types of organisms make up the diversity of a community. It is consisted of two components. The first one is species richness, or the number of different species in a community while the other one is the relative abundance of the different species. For example, imagine two communities, each with 80 individuals distributed among four different species-P,

These forces actually are the interactions among the species themselves and they consists of three main types which are competition, predation, and symbiosis. When two populations both require a limited resource for example shelter or food, individuals of the two species compete for the resource. The contest, called interspecific competition, can inhibit the growth of both populations. Sometimes the competition even eliminates one of the populations from a community. Interspecific competition may play a major role in structuring a community.
In 1934, Russian ecologist G.F, Gause came out an idea about competitive exclusion principle. He studied the effects of interspecific competition in laboratory experiments with two closely related species of protists, Paramecium Aurelia and P. caudatum. Then, he concluded that two species so similar that they compete for the same limiting resources cannot coexist in the same area. One will use the resources more efficiently and thus reproduce more rapidly. Even a slight reproductive advantage will eventually lead to local elimination of the inferior