Principles of Ecology, Interaction of Organisms within the Environment

There are between five to fifty million species of organisms on Earth, of which less than two
million have been officially named (May 1988). Many organisms are small: including
microbes that inhabit almost every crevice of the Earth; tiny worms that help build soils; and
insects that spend their entire lives in tree tops. Alongside these small denizens co-exist
larger, flashier species such as multicellular plants and fungi, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and
fellow mammals. These species, as well as many smaller ones, are consumers that depend
for sustenance on energetic biochemical compounds generated from light energy by
photosynthesizing producer species, or from inorganic chemical reactions by
chemosynthetic species.

The diversity of producer species, on which all life depends, is immense, and ranges from
cyanobacteria to towering trees in tropical and temperate rainforests.

Plant life occupies much of Earth’s land surface, providing structure to ecosystems (e.g.,
interacting systems of organisms and their physical environment), habitat for consumers,
and regulating the exchange of energy and chemicals with the atmosphere.
Nutrients from terrestrial systems wash into lakes and oceans, where additional primary
production by phytoplankton and algae helps support large communities of zooplankton,
fish, sea mammals, and birds. Over time, nutrients are returned from the oceans to the land
through the movements of organisms, atmospheric gaseous exchange, or slower geological
processes, such as the uplift of ocean sediments (Schlesinger 1997).

The environment is dynamic because physical processes drive change in Earth's attributes
over time. However, life itself drives equally important environmental changes. Because
other organisms are part of each individual’s environment, changes in species distributions
can profoundly alter ecological interactions within communities. In some cases, the loss of a
native species, or introduction of a non-native one, can threaten the survival of other
organisms. For this reason, the conservation of endangered organisms and control of
invasive species are of broad concern.
Interactions among organisms come in several different forms. These include:

1. Antagonism
In antagonistic relationships, organisms compete for resources, spread disease to
their neighbors, or consume each other.
Predation is an interaction between organisms in which one organism captures
biomass from another. It includes all forms of one organism eating another,
regardless of trophic level (e.g. herbivory), closeness of association (e.g. parasitism
and parasitoidism) and harm done to prey (e.g. grazing). Intraguild predation occurs
when an organism preys upon another of different species but at the same trophic
level (e.g., coyotes kill and ingest gray foxes in southern California).
Amensalism is where one species impedes or restricts the success of the other while
the other species has no effect on it.[1] It is a type of symbiosis. It usually occurs
when one organism exudes a chemical compound as part of its normal metabolism
that is detrimental to another organism. E.g the bread mold Penicillium secretes
penicillin which kills bacteria. The black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) secrete juglone,
a chemical that harms or kills some species of neighbouring plants, from its roots.
This interaction may instead increase the fitness of the non-harmed organism
though, by removing competition and allowing it access to greater scarce resources.
In this sense the impeding organism can be said to be negatively affected by the
other's very existence, making it a +/- interaction
2. Ecological facilitation
Facilitation describes species interactions that benefit at least one of the participants
and cause no harm to either. It includes mutualisms and commensalisms
(a) Commensalism
Benefits one organism and the other organism is neither benefited nor harmed. It
occurs when one organism takes benefits by interacting with another organism by
which the host organism is not affected. A good example is a remora living with a
shark. Remoras eat leftover food from the shark. The shark is not affected in the
process as remoras eat only leftover food of the shark which doesn't deplete the
shark’s resources.
 (b) Mutualism
Here, one organism shelters another, two organisms exchange resources, or tighter
dependencies evolve, such as coevolved relationships between specialized
pollinators and flowers. Similar interactions within a species are known as co-
operation. In some cases, species with large structures become habitat for smaller
organisms. For example, the human digestive tract harbours so many bacteria. One
or both species involved in the interaction may be obligate, meaning they cannot
survive in the short or long term without the other species.Examples include cleaner
fish, pollination and seed dispersal, gut flora and nitrogen fixation by fungi.
At a bigger scale, the evolutionary rise of flowering plants (angiosperms) and the
development of extensive rainforest canopies produced novel environments in
which animals tested new ecological strategies.
3. Competition

Competition is a mutually detrimental interaction between individuals, populations or

species, but rarely between clades.

Synnecrosis is a particular case in which the interaction is so mutually detrimental that it

results in death, as in the case of some parasitic relationships. It is a rare and necessarily
short-lived condition as evolution selects against it.

4. Neutralism

It describes the relationship between two species which interact but do not affect each
other. It describes interactions where the fitness of one species has absolutely no effect
whatsoever on that of the other. True neutralism is extremely unlikely or even impossible to
prove. When dealing with the complex networks of interactions presented by ecosystems,
one cannot assert positively that there is absolutely no competition between or benefit to
either species. Since true neutralism is rare or nonexistent, its usage is often extended to
situations where interactions are merely insignificant or negligible