How do adaptations enable organisms to reduce competition for food and other resources?

Competition is reduced any time an organism adapts to survive within a niche that is not being used by others within its environment. A niche refers to the way in which an organism fits into its environment and may include an organism’s habitat, diet, and reproductive processes. Organisms acquire their niches via natural selection. The niche of an organism is largely based on the evolution of an organism’s physiology, behavior, and morphology.

Diet will be used as an example to display how adaptations can reduce competition.

Adaptation and evolution occurs on populations. If there is competition for a food source, individuals that survive will be those that are strong enough to eat the current food of interest. Individuals within the population that learn to eat a different a food or foods will also survive. Since the “alterative eaters” found a niche that was not exhausted within the environment in which they live, they are more likely to survive than the organisms that continue to compete and fight over the original food-of-choice. Many of these “alternative eaters” will, therefore, survive long enough to have offspring.