Adapting in order to survive

Ecologists believe that every animal has its own “profession”, which consists in finding the perfect correspondence among the species and its own ecological segment (i.e. the position of each species in an ecosystem). It would be absurd to think of finding an organism that has not “adapted” to its own ecological segment, in fact the penalty for this would be its rapid extinction.
By adaptation, we mean any structure, any physiological or behavioural process, that makes an individual, an animal or a vegetable more adapted to survive and reproduce itself than other individuals of the same species. By adaptation we also mean the evolutive process with which a new character is consolidated through natural selection. Adaptation can increase the efficiency in finding or using some fundamental resources such as light, air, food, etc.; or it can allow the organism to support determined conditions such as high or low temperatures, the absence of light or to help its defensive capacity.

 
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