70 Part II Conditions and Resources

For ecologists, organisms are really only worth studying where they are able to
live. The most fundamental prerequisites for life in any environment are that
the organisms can tolerate the local conditions and that their essential
resources are being provided. We cannot expect to go very far in
understanding the ecology of any species without understanding
its interactions with conditions and resources.

resources, unlike conditions,
are consumed
3.1 Introduction
Conditions and resources are two quite distinct properties of environments that
determine where organisms can live. Conditions are physicochemical features of
the environment such as its temperature, humidity or, in aquatic environments,
pH. An organism always alters the conditions in its immediate environment
– sometimes on a very large scale (a tree, for example, maintains a zone of higher
humidity on the ground beneath its canopy) and sometimes only on a micro-
scopic scale (an algal cell in a pond alters the pH in the shell of water that
surrounds it). But conditions are not consumed nor used up by the activities
of organisms.
Environmental resources, by contrast, are consumed by organisms in the
course of their growth and reproduction. Green plants photosynthesize and
obtain both energy and biomass from inorganic materials. Their resources are
solar radiation, carbon dioxide, water and mineral nutrients. ‘Chemosynthetic’
organisms like many of the primitive Archaebacteria obtain energy by oxidizing
methane, ammonium ions, hydrogen sulfide or ferrous iron; they live in environ-
ments like hot springs and deep sea vents using resources that were abundant
during early phases of life on Earth. All other organisms use the bodies of other
organisms as their food. In each case, what has been consumed is no longer avail-
able to another consumer. The rabbit eaten by an eagle is not available to another
eagle. The quantum of solar radiation absorbed and photosynthesized by a leaf
is not available to another leaf. This has an important consequence: organisms
may compete with each other to capture a share of a limited resource.
In this chapter we consider, first, examples of the ways in which environ-
mental conditions limit the behavior and distribution of organisms. We draw
most of our examples from the effects of temperature, which serve to illustrate
many general effects of environmental conditions. We consider next the resources
used by photosynthetic green plants, and then we go on to examine the ways in
which organisms that are themselves resources have to be captured, grazed or
even inhabited before they are consumed. Finally we consider the ways in
which organisms of the same species may compete with each other for limited
resources.