Talk:Ecological niche

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 January 2021 and 17 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Leonardlauryn. Peer reviewers: Unwisedragon838, Lbothwe.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Habitat vs. niche

Isn't the place an organism lives its habitat? So what is the difference? 151.188.247.81 20:19, 5 March 2007 (UTC)CS[reply]

A habitat is like an organisms address, and a niche is like its occupation. Think of zebras and wildebeests grazing the same plain. They share the same habitat, but their niche is different - e.g. they eat different types of grass. As long as there is niche differentiation they can coexist. If this was not the case, the competitive exclusion principle would drive one to extinction. Richard001 07:05, 11 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think relating niche to occupation is confusing. A niche is the range of conditions and resources an organism needs to survive, grow and reproduce. This is what Hutchinson says and it is what the first external link says. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.217.42.253 (talk) 07:57, 10 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, well said. I just used that analogy from Campbell's Biology, but it's not a great one (perhaps forgivable given that it doesn't go into any detail on conditions and resources, unlike say Begon, Harper and Townsend). Richard001 (talk) 11:06, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Misleading photograph

The photograph of the lichens and its caption seem to be misleading to me. They suggest that ecological niche is a matter of physical location, whereas it is actually a more abstract concept, which refers to the range of possible circumstances under which a species can thrive. Sifonios (talk) 20:46, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I was just looking at Britannica's article on this (which is a bit shorter) and they've pulled the same photo and descripiton from here. I check back here and we're still using this photo too, and I had a similar thought. They're occupying a different space on the rock, but how do we know it's a different niche? Perhaps they just arrived in different places and haven't had time to spread much. What is it about the area of the rock where one lichen is that makes it ecologically different from the area where the other one is living? I don't think this image is so great for illustrating this concept so I'm going to take it down, and hope that at least one person does some work on this important article pretty soon. Richard001 (talk) 01:45, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Grammar and conceptual organization

The opening sentence, "In ecology, a niche (pronounced /ˈniːʃ/ or /ˈnɪtʃ/)[1] is a term describing the relational position of a species or population in its ecosystem to each other; e.g. a dolphin could potentially be in another ecological niche from one that travels in a different pod if the members of these pods utilize significantly different food resources and foraging methods," is so bad that I don't know where to start to correct it. 1) It's atrociously ungrammatical. 2) It introduces a secondary concept (the diet variability among members of a species) instead of what should be the central concept (the species niche). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.208.65.106 (talk) 23:46, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hutchinson section reads like it was written by a committee

Repeats material, grabs concepts from nowhere and inserts them...looks like an undergraduate essay. Someone please fix it so that it makes sense, and professors please stop assigning wikipedia articles to your students....

Avram Primack (talk) 02:58, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why is ecological needed to describe niche?

 Niche is by its nature limited by its surroundings.  This looks like an attempt by environmentalists to hijack a term to argue that Neanderthals should have won the confrontation with modern humans.Rdbooker1 (talk) 00:26, 29 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Merge proposal

The content at Niche differentiation and Niche segregation overlap heavily with this article and might therefore best be merged here. Note that this proposal arose following discussion at Talk:Niche differentiation, but is now probably best discussed here in the context of a broader merge. Klbrain (talk) 10:13, 26 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]