13.2.4 Population Interactions

13.2.4 Population Interactions 

• Can you think of any natural habitat on earth that is inhabited just by a single species? (No)
• There is no such habitat and such a situation is even inconceivable. 
• For any species, the minimal requirement is one more species on which it can feed. 
• Even a plant species, which makes its own food, cannot survive alone; it needs soil microbes to break down the organic matter in soil and return the inorganic nutrients for absorption. 
• And then, how will the plant manage pollination without an animal agent? 
• It is obvious that in nature, animals, plants and microbes do not and cannot live in isolation but interact in various ways to form a biological community. 
• Even in minimal communities, many interactive linkages exist, although all may not be readily apparent. 
• Interspecific interactions arise from the interaction of populations of two different species.
• They could be beneficial, detrimental or neutral (neither harm nor benefit) to one of the species or both. 
• Assigning a ‘+’ sign for beneficial interaction, ‘-’ sign for detrimental and 0 for neutral interaction, 
• let us look at all the possible outcomes of interspecific interactions.
• Mutualism (++): Both the species benefit in mutualism and both lose in competition in their interactions with each other. 
• Predation(+-): In both parasitism and predation only one species benefits (parasite and predator, respectively) and the interactionis detrimental to the other species (host and prey, respectively). 
• Commensalism (0+): The interaction where one species is benefitted and the other is neither benefitted nor harmed is called commensalism. 
• Amensalism (-0): In amensalism on the other hand one species is harmed whereas the other is unaffected.
• Protocooperation: it is an interaction between two species where both are benefited but not obligatory. 
• Scavanging:  it is a direct food relationship in which an animal feeds on other animals which died naturally or killed by other animal.
• Predation, parasitism and commensalism share a common characteristic– the interacting species live closely together.
• Although biological interactions, more or less individually, were studied earlier, Edward Haskell (1949) gave a integrative approach to the thematic, proposing a classification of "co-actions".
• later adopted by biologists as "interactions". Close and long-term interactions are described as symbiosis; symbioses that are mutually beneficial are called mutualistic.

(i) Predation (+ -): 

• What would happen to all the energy fixed by autotrophic organisms if the community has no animals to eat the plants? 
• You can think of predation as nature’s way of transferring to higher trophic levels the energy fixed by plants. 
• When we think of predator and prey, most probably it is the tiger and the deer that readily come to our mind, but a sparrow eating any seed is no less a predator. 
• Although animals eating plants are categorised separately as herbivores, they are, in a broad ecological context, not very different from predators. 
• Besides acting as ‘conduits’ for energy transfer across trophic levels, predators play other important roles. They keep prey populations under control. 
• But for predators, prey species could achieve very high population densities and cause ecosystem instability. 
• When certain exotic species are introduced into a geographical area, they become invasive and start spreading fast because the invaded land does not have its natural predators. 
• The prickly pear cactus introduced into Australia in the early 1920’s caused havoc by spreading rapidly into millions of hectares of range land. 
• Finally, the invasive cactus was brought under control only after a cactus-feeding predator (a moth) from its natural habitat was introduced into the country. 
• Biological control methods adopted in agricultural pest control are based on the ability of the predator to regulate prey population. 
• Predators also help in maintaining species diversity in a community, by reducing the intensity of competition among competing prey species. 
• In the rocky intertidal communities of the American Pacific Coast the starfish Pisaster is an important predator. 
• In a field experiment, when all the starfish were removed from an enclosed intertidal area, more than 10 species of invertebrates became extinct within a year, because of interspecific competition. 
• If a predator is too efficient and overexploits its prey, then the prey might become extinct and following it, the predator will also become extinct for lack of food. 
• This is the reason why predators in nature are ‘prudent’. 

Prey species have evolved various defenses to lessen the impact of predation. 

• Some species of insects and frogs are cryptically-coloured (camouflaged) to avoid being detected easily by the predator. 
• Some are poisonous and therefore avoided by the predators. 
• The Monarch butterfly is highly distasteful to its predator (bird) because of a special chemical present in its body. 
• Interestingly, the butterfly acquires this chemical during its caterpillar stage by feeding on a poisonous weed. 
• For plants, herbivores are the predators. 
• Nearly 25 per cent of all insects are known to be phytophagous (feeding on plant sap and other parts of plants). 
• The problem is particularly severe for plants because, unlike animals, they cannot run away from their predators. Plants therefore have evolved an astonishing variety of morphological and chemical defences against herbivores. 
• Thorns (Acacia, Cactus) are the most common morphological means of defence. 
• Many plants produce and store chemicals that make the herbivore sick when they are eaten, inhibit feeding or digestion, disrupt its reproduction or even kill it. 
• You must have seen the weed Calotropis growing in abandoned fields. 
• The plant Calotropis produces highly poisonous cardiac glycosides and that is why you never see any cattle or goats browsing on this plant. 
• A wide variety of chemical substances that we extract from plants on a commercial scale (nicotine, caffeine, quinine, strychnine, opium, etc.,) are produced by them actually as defences against grazers and browsers. 

(ii) Competition (- -): 

• When Darwin spoke of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest in nature, he was convinced that interspecific competition is a potent force in organic evolution.
• It is generally believed that competition occurs when closely related species compete for the same resources that are limiting, but this is not entirely true. 

Interspecific competition

• One, totally unrelated species could also compete for the same resource. 
• For instance, in some shallow South American lakes visiting flamingoes and resident fishes compete for their common food, the zooplankton in the lake. 

Interference competition:

• Other, resources need not be limiting for competition to occur; in interference competition, the feeding efficiency of one species might be reduced due to the interfering and inhibitory presence of the other species, even if resources (food and space) are abundant. 
• Therefore, competition is best defined as a process in which the fitness of one species (measured in terms of its ‘r’ the intrinsic rate of increase) is significantly lower in the presence of another species. 
• It is relatively easy to demonstrate in laboratory experiments, as Gause and other experimental ecologists did, when resources are limited the competitively superior species will eventually eliminate the other species, but evidence for such competitive exclusion occurring in nature is not always conclusive. 
• Strong and persuasive circumstantial evidence does exist however in some cases. 
• The Abingdon tortoise in Galapagos Islands became extinct within a decade after goats were introduced on the island, apparently due to the greater browsing efficiency of the goats. 
• Another evidence for the occurrence of competition in nature comes from what is called ‘competitive release’. 

Competitive release:

• A species whose distribution is restricted to a small geographical area because of the presence of a competitively superior species, is found to expand its distributional range dramatically when the competing species is experimentally removed. Connell’s elegant field experiments showed that on the rocky sea coasts of Scotland, the larger and competitively superior barnacle Balanus dominates the intertidal area, and excludes the smaller barnacle Chathamalus from that zone. 
• In general, herbivores and plants appear to be more adversely affected by competition than carnivores. 
• Gause’s ‘Competitive Exclusion Principle’ states that two closely related species competing for the same resources cannot co-exist indefinitely and the competitively inferior one will be eliminated eventually. 
• This may be true if resources are limiting, but not otherwise. 
• More recent studies do not support such gross generalisations about competition. 
• While they do not rule out the occurrence of interspecific competition in nature, they point out that species facing competition might evolve mechanisms that promote co-existence rather than exclusion. One such mechanism is ‘resource partitioning’. 

Resource partitioning:

• If two species compete for the same resource, they could avoid competition by choosing, for instance, different times for feeding or different foraging patterns. 
• MacArthur showed that five closely related species of warblers living on the same tree were able to avoid competition and co-exist due to behavioural differences in their foraging activities. 

(iii) Parasitism (+ -): 

• Considering that the parasitic mode of life ensures free lodging and meals, it is not surprising that parasitism has evolved in so many taxonomic groups from plants to higher vertebrates. 
• Many parasites have evolved to be host-specific (they can parasitise only a single species of host) in such a way that both host and the parasite tend to co-evolve; that is, if the host evolves special mechanisms for rejecting or resisting the parasite, the parasite has to evolve mechanisms to counteract and neutralise them, in order to be successful with the same host species.
• In accordance with their life styles, parasites evolved special adaptations such as the loss of unnecessary sense organs, presence of adhesive organs or suckers to cling on to the host, loss of digestive system and high reproductive capacity. 
• The life cycles of parasites are often complex, involving one (monogenetic) or two (digenetic) intermediate hosts or vectors to facilitate parasitisation of its primary host. 
• The human liver fluke (a trematode parasite) depends on two intermediate hosts (a snail and a fish) to complete its life cycle. 
• The malarial parasite needs a vector (mosquito) to spread to other hosts. 
• Majority of the parasites harm the host; they may reduce the survival, growth and reproduction of the host and reduce its population density. 
• They might render (give/provide) the host more vulnerable to predation by making it physically weak. 

Do you believe that an ideal parasite should be able to thrive within the host without harming it? 

• In parasitism one of the partners is benefited because it resides outside or inside the body of the host and gets free accommodation and food while the host is affected due to loss of nutrients. Parasites are always harmful.

Then why didn’t natural selection lead to the evolution of such totally harmless parasites?

• There are organisms which thrive within the host without harming it, but they are not called ideal parasites. The term for such interaction is commensalism example includes gut bacteria inhabiting gut of humans. 
• Thus, you can say that natural selection has indeed lead to the evolution of organisms which are not harmful to their hosts. But, they won't be called as ideal parasites.

• Parasites that feed on the external surface of the host organism are called ectoparasites. 
• The most familiar examples of this group are the lice on humans and ticks on dogs. 
• Many marine fish are infested with ectoparasitic copepods (meaning "oar-feet") are a group of small crustaceans found in nearly every freshwater and saltwater habitat. 
• Cuscuta, a parasitic plant that is commonly found growing on hedge plants, has lost its chlorophyll and leaves in the course of evolution. 
• It (Cuscuta) derives its nutrition from the host plant which it parasitises. 

The female mosquito is not considered a parasite, although it needs our blood for reproduction. Can you explain why? 

• The female mosquito is not considered as a parasite because it needs blood for reproduction and not for nutrition. It does not bite human for its meal. It bites humans so that it can nourish the developing fertile eggs.

• In contrast, endoparasites are those that live inside the host body at different sites (liver, kidney, lungs, red blood cells, etc.). 
• The life cycles of endoparasites are more complex because of their extreme specialisation. 
• Their morphological and anatomical features are greatly simplified while emphasising their reproductive potential. 

Brood parasitism:

• In birds is a fascinating example of parasitism in which the parasitic bird lays its eggs in the nest of its host and lets the host incubate them. 
• During the course of evolution, the eggs of the parasitic bird have evolved to resemble the host’s egg in size and colour to reduce the chances of the host bird detecting the foreign eggs and ejecting them from the nest. 
• Try to follow the movements of the cuckoo (koel) and the crow in your neighborhood park during the breeding season (spring to summer) and watch brood parasitism in action. 

(iv) Commensalism (+0): 

• This is the interaction in which one species benefits and the other is neither harmed nor benefited. 
• An orchid growing as an epiphyte on a mango branch, and barnacles growing on the back of a whale benefit while neither the mango tree nor the whale derives any apparent benefit. 
• The cattle egret and grazing cattle in close association, a sight you are most likely to catch if you live in farmed rural areas, is a classic example of commensalism. 
• The egrets always forage close to where the cattle are grazing because the cattle, as they move, stir up and flush out from the vegetation insects that otherwise might be difficult for the egrets to find and catch. 
• Another example of commensalism is the interaction between sea anemone that has stinging tentacles and the clown fish that lives among them. 
• The fish gets protection from predators which stay away from the stinging tentacles. The anemone does not appear to derive any benefit by hosting the clown fish. 

(v) Mutualism: 

• This interaction confers benefits on both the interacting species (++).

 Lichens:

• Represent an intimate mutualistic relationship between a fungus and photosynthesising algae or cyanobacteria. 

Mycorrhizae:

• Similarly, the mycorrhizae are associations between fungi and the roots of higher plants. 
• The fungi help the plant in the absorption of essential nutrients from the soil while the plant in turn provides the fungi with energy-yielding carbohydrates. 
• The most spectacular and evolutionarily fascinating examples of mutualism are found in plant-animal relationships. 

Pollination:

• Plants need the help of animals for pollinating their flowers and dispersing their seeds. Animals obviously have to be paid ‘fees’ for the services that plants expect from them. 
• Plants offer rewards or fees in the form of pollen and nectar for pollinators and juicy and nutritious fruits for seed dispersers. 
• But the mutually beneficial system should also be safeguarded against ‘cheaters’, for example, animals that try to steal nectar without aiding in pollination. 
• Now you can see why plant-animal interactions often involve co-evolution of the mutualists, that is, the evolutions of the flower and its pollinator species are tightly linked with one another. 

Fig trees-Wasp oviposition 

• In many species of fig trees, there is a tight one-to-one relationship with the pollinator species of wasp.
• It means that a given fig species can be pollinated only by its ‘partner’ wasp species and no other species. 
• The female wasp uses the fruit not only as an oviposition (egg-laying) site but uses the developing seeds within the fruit for nourishing its larvae. 
• The wasp pollinates the fig inflorescence while searching for suitable egg-laying sites. In return for the favour of pollination the fig offers the wasp some of its developing seeds, as food for the developing wasp larvae. 

Sexual deceit

• Orchids show a bewildering diversity of floral patterns many of which have evolved to attract the right pollinator insect (bees and bumblebees) and ensure guaranteed pollination by it.
• Not all orchids offer rewards. The Mediterranean orchid Ophrys employs ‘sexual deceit’ to get pollination done by a species of bee. 
• One petal of its flower bears an uncanny resemblance to the female of the bee in size, colour and markings. 
• The male bee is attracted to what it perceives as a female, ‘pseudocopulates’ with the flower, and during that process is dusted with pollen from the flower. 
• When this same bee ‘pseudocopulates’ with another flower, it transfers pollen to it and thus, pollinates the flower. Here you can see how co-evolution operates. 
• If the female bee’s colour patterns change even slightly for any reason during evolution, pollination success will be reduced unless the orchid flower co-evolves to maintain the resemblance of its petal to the female bee.