Question

1. Owls have large eyes that enable it to see well at night. Both the hawk and the owl hunt similar things: small rodents or snakes. How do the hawk and the owl avoid competing with each other?
   
2. Birds which live on the prairie have short but muscular legs (like the pheasant). Prairies are large grasslands that have few numbers of trees. What do you think the legs of a pheasant are adapted for?
3. conjecture three examples of human adaptations. Describe the advantages for survival of these adaptations.  

Answer 1

Owls and hawks avoid intense competition for common resources via a process call resource partitioning. Resource partitioning can be over space and time. In the case of Owl and Hawks, Owls usually hunts at night. It is a case of temporal resource partitioning. And they coexist happily!

The pheasant legs are short and small. But they are strong and used for running fast to avoid predation. The pheasants do not have long flight capacity. As prairies are vast grassland they also don't have large trees for perching.

Three most important human adaptation

1. Upright movement/bipedal movement: This freed the two forelimbs/arms that allowed us to make and use tools. This has helped considerably from hunting to stretching for fruits in the trees. Free arms were used for the communications as well during the prehistoric time.

2. Opposable thumbs: The opposable thumbs provided a great advantage during our course of evolution. It helped in gripping tools etc. The precision of grips due to opposable thumbs was proved very useful.

3. Sweat: It allowed us to adapt to changing environments. The sweat is used to maintain constant body temperature. During the early history of human evolution, the sweat/cooling of the body helped the hunter-gatherers to adapt to the high heat conditions of tropical areas.