Limits on Businesses Adapting to New Markets

In living organisms, the genetic heritage of a species limits its abilities to live in any habitat and confines it to one or more specific habitats to be able to live in. The same species might adapt to a number of different habitats yet still be completely unable to inhabit many other habitats that are not suitable for it.

By the same token, some businesses may survive well in a number of different 'habitats' or markets, others would survive only within a single type of 'habitat' or market. Some businesses can adapt nicely with a number of new markets while being unable to survive in yet some others. It would not be wise for a long standing business to attempt to target a market that it cannot adapt with.

How to Get Creative Ideas!

A virgin habitat can easily be colonized by a newly arriving species that reproduces rapidly giving a large number of offspring that can be relatively small in size and not of high average fitness. A species living in a habitat that already has full 'residence' of organisms faces high competition and thus delays reproduction, producing fewer offspring that are larger in size and enjoy a higher average fitness.

In order to have plenty of creative ideas 'colonizing' your mind and multiplying, you must first cleans your mind from many of the other competing ideas that colonize it. By doing so, your mind becomes fertile land for creative ideas to keep jumping in and multiplying very rapidly. Eventually, they will fill your mind with good stuff. In contrast, if you keep heavy ideas dwelling in your mind, they will be competing harshly and will not give room for creative ideas to enter. In fact, the old dwelling ideas will reproduce new ideas very scarcely and their reproduction will be delayed.

Select your Business Habitat Carefully

Some regions have people that live longer than others living at other regions. The fitness of individuals is affected by the habitat in which they live. Likewise, if you open shop at a particular location, the 'habitat' can have an effect on the 'fitness' of your business. It is therefore crucial to carefully select the location where you will start your business and/or do business for location can either make or break the prosperity of your new or expanding business.

Habitats in Paradise

The kind of habitat determines what sort of organisms would live and flourish in it. Some distant secluded islands may show varieties of organisms that are not found elsewhere and are quite different from what we are used to see. Organisms living and flourishing in a particular habitat tend to be well adapted to such habitat and live in harmony with it.

Now let's imagine what sort of 'habitat' or different habitats would be present in paradise? For sure it would be quite different from the ones we have here on earth. Consequently, the types of organisms living there would be equally wondrous.

Ecological Niches

Ideas

Thoughts

1. If you want to move people out from a place, make changes to the 'environment' of that place so as to make its properties beyond the tolerable conditions of the 'ecological' niche of those people.
2. Ecological niche dimensions for agriculture.

Do

1. I would love to play with the computer modeling of ecological niches.
2. Niche dimensions for plants.

Digest

• Ecological niche vs. habitat:
• A habitat of an organism is the sort of place in which it lives.
• An ecological niche of an organism is "a summary of the organism’s tolerances and requirements."
• "Each habitat provides many different niches and with quite different lifestyles."
• Charles Sutherland Elton, in 1933, was the first to write about ecological niche in its current scientific meaning.
• Hutchinson, in 1957, proposed the modern concept of niche to address the ways in which tolerances and requirements interact to define conditions and resources needed by a species.
• Niche dimensions: "The ecological niche of a species [is] the boundaries that limit where it can live, grow and reproduce."
• One-dimensional: temperature (plants)
• Two-dimensional: temperature, salinity (sand shrimp)
• Three-dimensional: temperature, pH, availability of a particular food (aquatic organism)
• N-dimensional: the real niche of a species must be multidimensional
• fundamental and the realized niche.
• the overall potentialities of a species
• Fundamental vs. realized niches:
• Fundamental niches: "describes the overall potentialities of a species"
• Realized niches: "describes the more limited spectrum of conditions and resources that allow it to persist, even in the presence of competitors and predators.

Questions

1. The concept of ecological niche seems to be cool!
2. It would be cool to explore what computer modeling has to do with the various dimensions of ecological niches.

Genetic Polymorphism

Thoughts

When selecting a plant from its natural habitat, say from Aswan, to transplant elsewhere, it is a good idea to select from a location that would provide the characteristics you desire in the plant (ex: lower elevation to be more drought tolerant ... etc.)

Digest

• "The distinction between local ecotypes and polymorphic populations is not always a clear one."
• Genetic polymorshipsm was defined by Edmund Brisco Ford in 1940 as: "the occurrence together in the same habitat of two or more discontinuous forms of a species in such proportions that the rarest of them cannot merely be maintained by recurrent mutation or immigration".
• Transient polymorphisms occur when conditions in a habitat change so that one form is being replaced by another.
• In contrast to transient polymorphism, many polymorphisms are actively maintained in a population by natural selection, and there are a number of ways in which this may occur:
• Heterozygotes may be of superior fitness, but continually generate less fit homozygotes within the population
• Presence of gradients of selective forces favoring one morph at one end of the gradient and another form at the other
• There may be frequency-dependent selection in which each of the morphs of a species is fittest when it is rarest
• Selective forces may operate in different directions within different patches in the population

Questions

1. What is the difference between polymorphism and ecotypes?
2. What is polymorphism?
3. What are ecotypes?