Individual and Population Responses to Environments

Abstract

The degree to which an insect or other organism becomes integrated into the environment is dependent in part upon how long the species has occupied it. The extent to which a species becomes a resident of a certain community is a function of many factors, of which the following often prevail: (1) the number and abundance of ecologically similar and/or closely related species present in the community, (2) the ability of the species to obtain sufficient resources for survival and breeding, (3) the ability of the species to withstand biotic mortality agents such as pathogenic microorganisms, predators, and parasites, and (4) the ability to cope with shifts in (1) through (3) resulting from seasonality and to cope with the abiotic changes in the environment brought into play by seasonality.