how does adaptation to the environment help promote survival of a species?

Answer 1

Animals live everywhere on Earth. Some places on Earth are very hot and some are very cold. Some places on Earth have a lot of water and plants, and other places have very little water and few plants. Antarctica is covered with snow and ice and has no plants. It is very cold there, too. Guess what? Animals even live in Antarctica!

Animals can live in many different places in the world because they have special adaptations to the area they live in. An adaptation is a way an animal's body helps it survive, or live, in its environment. Camels have learned to adapt (or change) so that they can survive.

Animals depend on their physical features to help them obtain food, keep safe, build homes, withstand weather, and attract mates. These physical features are called called physical adaptations. They makes it possible for the animal to live in a particular place and in a particular way. Each adaptation has been produced by evolution. This means that the adaptations have developed over many generations. The shape of a bird's beak, the number of fingers, colour of the fur, the thickness or thinness of the fur, the shape of the nose or ears are all examples of physical adaptations which help different animals to survive.

Answer 2

The crudest answer is that those individuals in a species, faced with a challenging (note I did not write "hostile") environment, that do survive to reproduce most often pass along the physical traits that enable them to persist in such an environment.

This is called the "survival of the fittest" and is without a doubt the most mis-understood and mis-used feature of the Theory of Evolution articulated by Charles Darwin. Some people say that nature is harsh and cruel and does not allow survival of any but those best suited to struggle. Others apply this idea to societies - and both of those answers have led to great difficulties in natural science and in human society.

For an exceptionally good, but very long and detailed, answer to your question, consult the collected articles of Stephen Jay Gould. You could do worse than begin with either of these books - "The Panda's Thumb," or "Leonardo's Clams and the Diet of Worms." If you would like a more entertaining treatment of the topic, start reading Harry Turtledove's wonderful books of alternative history.

Considered in a very broad sense, there are two aspects to adaptation, over great periods of time, that each apply. The first is "specialization." The second is "generalization." (I used "generalization" but some scientists have another term that really means the same thing.)

"Specialization" is applied to species that grow very specific capabilities suited to their environment. An example includes the range of species that at one time populated most of the Northern Hemisphere - animals such as the woolly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger, the eohippus, and the giant sloth. Many of these animals - not all; the eohippus died out rather early - survived into the age of humanity, but they were well on their way to extinction because they had become too good at living in the world their ancestors knew.

People today debate the extinction of the woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, some claiming early humans hunted them to death. Most believe that these animals were over-specialized. They had adapted to the extreme conditions of life in a world dominated by ice, by long winters and short growing seasons, by feeding on other big animals. When the last Great Ice Age ended, and the food supplies and weather conditions changed, the animals were no long adapted to their environment - and the changes happened too quickly to permit them to adapt, again, to a different environment.

But their descendants survive today in the jungles of India and the plains of Africa. THEY adapted and in a less-specialized form.

And that leads to the next version of adaptation - "generalized" forms. Ultimately, it appears that the most successful of all animals are those that are able to deal with many variations in their environments - that their adaptation is not specific (such as thick woolly coats for cold), but general (the possession of a thumb to use in grasping sticks to make a shelter from the cold). Human beings are one very good example but not the only one. There are animals that we do not consider "sentient," or self-aware, that can still make tools in order to alter their environments for survival. These include various species of birds and fish.

Ultimately, adaptation of a species to be flexible is the greatest of environmental survival skills. And in this case, sometime strength is not the power to dominate or destroy, but the power of flexibility and some sort of creativity and the ability to teach another one of the species a lesson learned. There should be a new definition of "fittest" in the world.

Answer 3

The individuals within a species don't actually biologically "adapt". Individuals within a species however generally exhibit a range of characteristics. Some are larger or smaller, hairier or balder, one color vs. another. Adaptation comes into place when some combination of those characteristics convey a benefit to that particular individual in the likely hood that the individual will be able to pass on their unique genetic information to the next generation. When that individual passes on his/her/it's genetic information it also passes on those character traits that conveyed a greater likelihood of having offspring. Conversely if those traits were detrimental to the individuals ability to pass on his/her/it's genetic information then the likelihood of those traits being passed on to subsequent generations is reduced.

Thus the children of the current generation will be more likely to demonstrate some traits vs. others. Or in other words the species over multiple generations will adapt.

Answer 4

avoiding predation (colors hide them better)

having more offspring (more chances of survival)

adaptation to changing food sources

adaptation to changing physical environment (temprature, humidity, etc)

Answer 5

I don't know I am extinct.....