Question

White-breasted nuthatches and Downy woodpeckers both eat insects that hide in the furrows of bark in hardwood trees. The Downy woodpecker searches for insects by hunting from the bottom of the tree trunk towards the top, whereas the white-breasted nuthatch searches from the top of the trunk down. These hunting behaviors best illustrate which of the following ecological concepts?A. bottom-up and top-down hypothesesB. competitive exclusionC. keystone speciesD. resource partitioningE. character displacement

Answer 1

Answer:

resource partitioning

Explanation:

• If the species live in an ecological niche where there is limited availability of resources then the organisms adapt the strategy of dividing the limited resources to survive and avoid competition and such a strategy is called resource partitioning.
• In the given question, it has been given that the downy woodpecker moves from the bottom to the top whereas the white-breasted nuthatch moves in the opposite direction and hence they occupy different levels of the tree at different times and avoid competition.
• Thus, this is an example of resource partitioning.