Niche differentiation ~ co-existence ! - நின்னைச் சரணடைந்தேன்.

In my terrace, difference species come for eating food grains  and each have a different ideology !  Pigeons come in big cluster, sometimes they are chased away by Crows – a solitary or two Cuckoos too try to peck, again could be attacked by Crows;  Parrots try to sneak in making lot of sound, but would fly away at the slightest disturbance – In the melee half-a-dozen Squirrels run around – they are so fast that sometimes they literally run under the feet of Parrots and Pigeons in a jiffy. 

There could be in-fighting within the species too – yet they co-exist !! 

In ecology, niche differentiation is the  process by which competing species use the environment differently in a way that helps them to coexist. The competitive exclusion principle holds  that if two species with identical niches (ecological roles) compete, then one will inevitably drive the other to extinction.It need not be ‘survival of the fittest’ – better is ‘co-existence and survival’. !! 

Coexistence theory is a framework to understand how competitor traits can maintain species diversity and stave-off competitive exclusion even among similar species living in ecologically similar environments. Coexistence theory explains the stable coexistence of species as an interaction between two opposing forces: fitness differences between species, which should drive the best-adapted species to exclude others within a particular ecological niche, and stabilizing mechanisms, which maintains diversity via niche differentiation. 

பொன்னை உயர்வைப் புகழை விரும்பிடும்

என்னைக் கவலைகள் தின்னத் தகாதென்று

நின்னைச் சரணடைந்தேன்.

 

மிடிமையும் அச்சமும் மேவி என் நெஞ்சில்

குடிமை புகுந்தன, கொன்று அவை போக்கின

 

மகாகவி சுப்பிரமணிய பாரதியாரின் ‘கண்ணன் பாட்டு’ தொகுதியில் ‘கண்ணம்மா என் குலதெய்வம்’ என்ற தலைப்பில் உள்ள பாட லின் சில வரிகள்.

 
Regards – S Sampathkumar
19.11.2024