How can an organism's ability to survive and reproduce affect the entire population and what is the ability of species to survive habitat changes and survive?
Dr. Naresh,
I am trying to answer this question as well, because it links to your other questions. Again this comes down to a difference in perception between Western and Indigenous ways of reasoning and understanding. If you llok in Chapter 4 of my book (Pierotti, R. 2011. Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) you will find discussion of this theme. I also explore this in a paper I am attaching below (Pierotti, R. 2010a. Sustainability of natural populations: Lessons from Indigenous Knowledge. Human Dimensions of Wildlife 15: 274-287).
Basically it comes down to this, Indigenous Reasoning sees populations as being strongly influenced by variations among individuals, whereas Western reasoning has tried to study populations by focusing on the population mean performance. Western reasoning, e.g. NSY, Lotka Volterra , has led to the collapse of many wild populations because of the tendency to remove the oldest, largest, and most experienced individuals as part of population exploitation. In contrast, Indigenous approaches emphasize not taking, old, large, and experienced individuals because they assume that such individuals allow populations to function better and more sustainably.
This can be illustrated through the failure of Western (Temporal) reasoning to incorporate the results of Long Term Population studies which invariably show that mean performance is misleading and that the bulk of successful breeding is done by around only 10-20% of individuals. Despite the fact that this has been known for almost 40 years, Western harvesting practices still focus primarily upon mean, or average, performance, and populations, especially marine fisheries collapse, because of this inadequate and incorrect way of reasoning.
Ability to survive different environmental conditions is key to increase the animal population. Survival of environmental conditions usually take som times to avail animal the opportunity to adapt themselves to different conditions. Adaption overtime will mean animal has evolved certain character and feature to be able to survive and reproduce.
Organisms with heritable features that help them survive and reproduce in a particular environment tend to leave more offspring than their peers. If this continues over generations, the heritable features that aid survival and reproduction will become more and more common in the population. The biological fitness of an organism is dependent on its ability to survive and reproduce in a given environment. If different traits or alleles increase the fitness of an organism, those alleles will consequently increase in the gene pool, and that trait will increase in the population. Reproduction is the process of producing new individuals of the same species by existing organisms of a species, so, it helps in providing stability to population of species by giving birth to new individuals as the rate of birth must be at par with the rate of death to provide stability to population of a species. Biological fitness, also called Darwinian fitness, means the ability to survive to reproductive age, find a mate, and produce offspring. Basically, the more offspring an organism produces during its lifetime, the greater its biological fitness. The individual does not get time to evolve because of changes in the external environment. The only thing that one notices is cellular ageing. This is why variation is beneficial to the species but not necessarily for the individuals. Evolutionary adaptation, or simply adaptation, is the adjustment of organisms to their environment in order to improve their chances at survival in that environment. Adaptation by natural selection acting over generations is one important process by which species change over time in response to changes in environmental conditions. Traits that support successful survival and reproduction in the new environment become more common; those that do not become less common. An organism has a role, or niche, in its habitat. A niche includes the type of food the organism eats and how it gets this food. A niche also includes when and how the organism reproduces and the physical conditions that it needs to survive. Although habitats provide food, water and shelter that animals need, there is more to survival than just the habitat. It is their own adaptations that allow animals to get food, stay safe, and reproduce within that specific habitat. Without their adaptations, the species could not thrive in that environment.
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