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Many aspects of an animal or plant can be correctly called adaptations, though there are always some features whose function remains in doubt. By using the term adaptation for the evolutionary process, and adaptive trait for the bodily part or function (the product), one may distinguish the two different senses of the word. [14] [15] [16] [17]
This indicates that incipient air breathing was developed, as well as modification of the hyoid arch towards stapes development. [5] These characteristics account for why osteichthyans are accepted as the sister group of tetrapods. [2] The elpistostegalid fish are considered the most apomorphic of fish in comparison to tetrapods. [2]
Shade tolerant plants have a range of adaptations to help them survive the altered quantity and quality of light typical of shade environments. Excess light occurs at the top of canopies and on open ground when cloud cover is low and the sun's zenith angle is low, typically this occurs in the tropics and at high altitudes.
The best known representatives of taxa that exhibit some kind of the ontogenetic niche shift are fish (e.g. migration of so-called diadromous fish between saltwater and freshwater for purpose of breeding [2]), insects (e.g. metamorphosis between different life stages; such as larva, pupa and imago [2]) and amphibians (e.g. metamorphosis from ...
Aquatic plants require special adaptations for prolonged inundation in water, and for floating at the water surface. The most common adaptation is the presence of lightweight internal packing cells, aerenchyma , but floating leaves and finely dissected leaves are also common.
Several groups of tetrapods have undergone secondary aquatic adaptation, an evolutionary transition from being purely terrestrial to living at least part of the time in water. These animals are called "secondarily aquatic" because although their ancestors lived on land for hundreds of millions of years, they all originally descended from ...
In evolutionary biology, adaptive radiation is a process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environment makes new resources available, alters biotic interactions or opens new environmental niches.
Acclimatization or acclimatisation (also called acclimation or acclimatation) is the process in which an individual organism adjusts to a change in its environment (such as a change in altitude, temperature, humidity, photoperiod, or pH), allowing it to maintain fitness across a range of environmental conditions.