Potential Causes of Vacant Niches
Vacant niches could potentially have several causes.
• Radical disturbances in a habitat: For example, droughts or forest fires can destroy a flora and fauna partially or completely. However, in such cases species suitable for the habitat usually survive in the neighbourhood and colonize the vacated niches, leading to a relatively fast re-establishment of the original conditions.
• Radical and long-lasting changes in the environment: such as ice ages.
• Evolutionary contingencies: suitable species did not evolve for usually unknown reasons, or niche segregation between pre-existing species created a novel niche vacancy.
Read more about this topic: Vacant Niche
Famous quotes containing the words potential and/or vacant:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay
Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,
The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,
Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,
And on the vacant air.”
—William Wordsworth (17701850)