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People seem to be misunderstanding niches.
Topic Started: Jan 10 2016, 11:24 PM (3,939 Views)
Zorcuspine
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I'm pinning this. Some things just need to be read.
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Monster
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This almost seems like another case of man trying to put things into boxes when nature is so fluid.


No, that's really how it works in many cases. There are behavioural and morphological reasons why as well - again there might be overlap and attempts in times of desperation or cheekiness but some animals really just do not go and get the same food from different environs because they can't. And others because other species are more dominant and will attack them.
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I put my finger in my finches nest box to check on the eggs, she was there she cracked a portion of my nail. It didn't hurt, but she did crack a small portion of my nail. This a response to malicious monkeys post.
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Monster
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Can you please try to stay on topic?
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Steampunk FireFinch
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Ok.
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FallingWhale
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These two birds have the same diet (mostly insects in the summer, mostly seeds in the winter), same habitat (mountain forests), same preferred searching place (pine trunks). The only major difference in feeding habit is the nuthatch climbs down trees and the creeper climbs up.

Nature is stupid.
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I'm glad this has been pinned, it's good to read for tips on making realistic ecological niches in projects.
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malicious-monkey
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Wow, I never realized how arbitrarily specific niches can be. This is enlightening.
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lamna
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They do have well partitioned nesting habits though, with nuthatches preferring tree holes while treecreepers nest in Sequoia trees.

Maybe that is also part of how they live together so comfortably, there are a lot more tree trunks to exploit than there are suitable nestholes/flaky bark, so there will always be plenty to go around.
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LittleLazyLass
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FallingWhale
Jan 14 2016, 01:06 AM
snip

Nature is stupid.
Is that the one from that tet zoo article I was thinking about earlier?
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They do have well partitioned nesting habits though, with nuthatches preferring tree holes while treecreepers nest in Sequoia trees.
I don't know, it seems like we just go out of our way to find more and a more marginal and minor things just to say they don't overlap.
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Velociraptor
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I think the Tet Zoo article was about nuthatches and woodpeckers, not creepers. But point remains the same.

Also I think I remember Darren making a quip in that article that if reality were a spec project, people would complain about the woodpeckers and nithatches occupying the same niche in the same place.
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Monster
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Yeah, he did.

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I don't know, it seems like we just go out of our way to find more and a more marginal and minor things just to say they don't overlap.

Differences in nesting behaviour isn't marginal/minor. Nest site availability is a major constraint. You might look at feeding guilds and see a lot of overlap but those species won't all be able to nest in the same place even if they can feed in many of the same places and on the same things.

You'd be horrified by the paper on wading birds I'm working on at the moment ;)
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revin
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Continuing with this, since many people have pointed out that unrealistic niche-filling is definitely quite prominent in spec project, what does everyone think the best solution to this is?

Perhaps thinking about more intermediate time periods between now and the main future time period in the project could help. However, tracking complete or even semi-complete lists of animals that go extinct, how their extinction affects the food web, etc. is quite difficult. There seem to be limits to how much plausibility you can get in terms of niches while remaining quite concise and continuing to capture reader attention.
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Corecin
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Thanks for pinning this, it really helped, even though I wouldn't consider myself "one of those people"
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sockmonkey
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I agree this needed to be said. I've seen some people refer to flying or swimming as a "niche" rather than a means of getting around.
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