Table of Contents
How does an organism respond to its environment?
Organisms often respond to their environment through adaptation. Organisms that make an adjustment to environmental conditions in their own lifetime make physiological adaptation. If the adaptation takes place over several generations, the trait is an evolutionary adaptation.
How are organisms affected by changes in the environment?
Hairston’s lab studies how individual species, food webs, and whole ecosystems are altered when the environment changes. One way that some freshwater organisms respond to environmental change is to evolve rapidly. A marked change in the environment favors some characteristics of plants, animals and microbes over others.
How does the nervous system respond to changes in the environment?
The nervous system allows an organism to respond quickly to changes in the internal or external environment. The responses to the stimuli are short-lasting. Receptors are groups of specialised cells.
Which is an example of an evolutionary change?
The shorter the generation time, the faster this evolutionary change can occur. For example, tiny but abundant plankton, eaten by fish and other larger animals, can become adapted to the changed environment within a few years because their generation time is only a few days.
Organisms react to different things in their environment, such as light. Other environmental factors include basic things such as heat, food, odors and sound. When these environmental factors affect or change an organism, they are called stimuli.
How are living things adapted to their environment?
As the organisms learn to adapt to the stimuli around them, they become better suited for living in the specific environment. For example, camels have long, thick eyelashes. The eyelashes work to protect their eyes from sand since they live in sandy environmental conditions.