Some observations on harpacticoid populations, in relationship to the competitive exclusion principle

• Main Authors: Hauspie, R, Polk, P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 13.09.2000

In the field ecology of populations, two concepts are largely distributed and generally accepted:- the competitive exclusion principle states that organisms occupying similar ecological niches, come into competition and consequently cannot coexist. - the more two organisms are close to each other in phylogeny, the more they will tend to occupy similar niches. The results obtained from the study of populations of harpacticoids colonizing artificial substrata are somehow an illustration of these principles. Indeed, these species which coexist belong most of the time to different genera or even to different families.