concept

Niche partitioning

How many seemingly competing species manage to coexist: instead of sharing one niche they split it, each doing a slightly different job until the deadly overlap is gone. The ecologist Robert MacArthur found five warbler species living in the same spruce trees were really feeding in five different zones of the tree. On Pandora the hexapede, direhorse and titanothere divide the forest by feeding height and food type - coexistence not as the absence of competition, but as competition already resolved into difference.