BIO-8 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Herbivore, Homeostasis, Phenotypic Plasticity
Document Summary
Some temporal variation in the environment is predictable (e. g. , alternation of day and night); some is unpredictable (e. g. , weather). Weather: the variation in temp and precipitation over periods of hours and days. Climate: the typical atmospheric conditions that occur through the year, measured over many years. Events can be rare, but have large effects (e. g. , tsunamis). Some variation occurs in regular intervals (e. g. , forest fires) In general, the more extreme events occur less frequency. Large-scale spatial variation may be caused by factors such as climate, land topography, and soil type. Small scale variation is generated by factors such as plant structure and animal behavior. A particular scale of spatial variation may be important to one organisms but not to another (e. g, leaf shape is imp. to an insect, but not to a large mammalian herbivore). Individuals moving through space experience spatial variation as a sequence in time (e. g. , an herbivore moving through crop fields).
