Resources are anything that plants or animals need to survive. Food, water, shelter, air, sunlight, soil, space, and energy are all resources. Some resources are not necessary for some organisms. For example, the kangaroo rat can survive a lifetime without water, and most animals don’t need soil to survive. However, being without most resources for very long can be detrimental to organisms’ health. Therefore, animals have to compete for the resources they need in order to survive. Can humans make the situation less vigorous? We probably can, by conserving resources and creating more resources instead of using up a ton of resources and letting animals suffer from that.
All resources are limited, so competition can arise when there are not enough resources, or because some organisms consume much more resources than available. Competition can be from the members of the same species, or from different species that need the same resources. Resource shortages can be caused by many different factors, including human factors or natural factors. Pollution including air, water, and soil can not only destroy resources, but also can make consumption of that resource hazardous, therefore decreasing the availability of the polluted resource. Urban sprawl pushes organisms out of the area and makes the competition more vigorous. Deforestation disrupts ecosystems by cutting down the trees and other plants. After these plants are gone, since the plants are a source of food for many animals, they will start competing for the residual plants as food. Global warming makes animals that cannot survive high temperatures, like pikas and polar bears, potentially at risk of death, so the animals’ predators will lose the food source. Natural disasters can make some resources unusable, killing off organisms that need them.
Organisms compete for resources in many ways, and plants and animals are especially different. Plants compete for water, soil, space, and sunlight. Plants grow longer, stronger, and/or deeper roots to get more water from the soil. They compete for sunlight by growing bigger and higher leaves, which helps them get more sunlight to increase production of food by photosynthesis. They compete for space by growing quickly to take advantage of all the available space that they can reach. For example, if an old tree dies, the younger trees can take their place. Animals compete for even more resources, including food, water, shelter, mates etc. They can use “survival of the fittest”, which means that the more adept animals survive on to the next generation to reproduce, and the weak eventually die off through lack of resources. Some animals just can’t find resources as more are being used, so they die out and the animals that do survive. They can also evolve and develop a “selfish gene” and make use of whatever resources they can reach so that they don’t die of not having enough resources. They compete for mates by being more attractive, like a peacock showing the pattern on its feathers to peahens, or a grasshopper making its wings vibrate to make a sound similar to music to other grasshoppers.
We can solve these problems by hunting members of large populations. This will make the species in the area more even, decreasing the chance of one or several dominant species using up all the resources. This overconsumption is a problem because other species’ populations will most likely decrease — even to an extent that they become extinct. We can also install wildlife reserves for small-population conservation so that other species will not use up their resources. Also, the animals that lost their shelter and cannot find food and clean water will not roam around the city looking for resources. This will not only decrease the chance that the animals will be harmed, it also protects the humans from being attacked by wild animals. In addition, we can slow down or even stop urban sprawl to increase the space that plants and animals can live in. We can plant trees both outside and inside the city, therefore creating more food and shelter for many animals, like birds that make nests inside trees. When these plants and animals have more resources to use, it makes the competition less vigorous, so the plants and animals can live in peace together.
In conclusion, resources are limited and scarce, and many animals are competing because they don’t have enough resources, and some species’ populations are decreasing as a result of the vigorous competition, and a few plant and animal species are bcoming extinct. We need to preserve resources and if possible, increase the resource availability by protecting the environment. If we don’t do anything about the current situation, many species could become extinct, and once they are, they will never come back. It’s time for humans to start caring more about the environment and slow or stop urban sprawl, and set up wildlife reserves, or help to balance species within the ecosystem. We can develop a system to preserve the resources that plants and animals need, and never let this situation happen again.
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