In the last two activities, you learned about communities, habitats, and niches. In this last activity within this lesson, you will learn about how a community relates to diversity within and among species.

As you saw in Activities 1 and 2, the type of community a species lives in will affect how it lives.

This illustrates how there can be diversity within a species just because of the habitat they are in.

To look at diversity among species based on habitat, let's look at the following wetlands example.

• If Wetland 1 has lots of water, a wide variety of species of both animals and plants will make their homes in the wetland.

 

 

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• If Wetland 2 is drying up, the variety of species of animals and plants found there will be significantly less.

 

 

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Depending upon the circumstances, this difference in wetlands can occur in a very small area. This is usually brought on by one of the wetlands being drained for agricultural reasons such as irrigating (watering) a field of corn or developing the land for crops.

A certain species may also have different niches in various communities. Consider seals, for example. If seals live behind a reef or some other obstacle that prevents killer whales from getting at them, they will be at the top of the food chain in the area. The seals will be the predators in that community.

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However, if no reef or other obstacle protects the seals, they become both predator and prey in that community. They will still be predators to some animals, but now they are also prey for the killer whales. The seals occupy a different niche based on both the community and the habitat that they live in.

True or False?

If a population of animals is large, there will be more competition for food and, therefore, smaller litters.

If a wetland has lots of water, there won't be very many species who will want to make a home there.