Ecological relationships describe the interactions between and among organisms within their environment. These interactions may have positive, negative or neutral effects on either species' ability to survive and reproduce, or "fitness." By classifying these effects, ecologists have derived five major types of species interactions: predation, competition, mutualism, commensalism and amensalism.
Predation: One Wins, One Loses
Predation includes any interaction between two species in which one species benefits by obtaining resources from and to the detriment of the other. While it's most often associated with the classic predator-prey interaction, in which one species kills and consumes another, not all predation interactions result in the death of one organism. In the case of herbivory, a herbivore often consumes only part of the plant. While this action may result in injury to the plant, it may also result in seed dispersal. Many ecologists include parasitic interactions in discussions of predation. In such relationships, the parasite causes harm to the host over time, possibly even death. As an example, parasitic tapeworms attach themselves to the intestinal lining of dogs, humans and other mammals, consuming partially digested food and depriving the host of nutrients, thus lowering the host's fitness.
Competition: The Double Negative
Competition exists when multiple organisms vie for the same, limiting resource. Because the use of a limited resource by one species decreases availability to the other, competition lowers the fitness of both. Competition can be interspecific, between different species, or intraspecific, between individuals of the same species. In the 1930s, Russian ecologist Georgy Gause proposed that two species competing for the same limiting resource cannot coexist in the same place at the same time. As a consequence, one species may be driven to extinction, or evolution reduces the competition.
<span>Organisms have the ability to regulate their
internal environment in order to maintain a steady state called homeostasis. It
is nature of the organisms to balance their body systems at the end of the day
like how nature reinvents himself when he is too stresses. Living organisms do
that to, by sleeping after doing a very demanding job.</span>
The negative feedback system is the most common in the body, being considered by many authors the primary mechanism for the maintenance of homeostasis. It causes a negative change from the initial change, that is, a stimulus contrary to the one that led to the imbalance. In the case of the above question, when the ambient temperature increased, your body began to sweat to lower the temperature, that is, your body is trying to make a stimulus contrary to what is happening in the environment, so we can state that your body is going through a negative feedback system.
