Why is adaptation important to organisms

Horses adapted to fill this new grassland niche. They grew taller, and their legs and feet became better adapted to sprinting in the open grasslands.

Their eyes also adapted to be further back on their heads to help them to see more of the area around them. Each of these adaptations helped the evolving grassland horses to avoid predators.

Their teeth also changed to be better adapted to grinding tough grassland vegetation. Have you ever wondered what purpose the "dew" claw on the inside of a dog's paw serves? The claw is the dog's thumb. Because a dog runs on the balls of its feet and four digits, the claw no longer serves a purpose.

Organs or parts of the body that no longer serve a function are called vestigial structures. They provide evidence that the species is still changing. Even humans have vestigial structures. The human appendix is one such example. It used to store microbes that helped to digest plant matter, but it is no longer needed in the human.

Skip to main content. K-5 GeoSource. An adaptation is passed from generation to generation. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

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You cannot download interactives. In the mids, Charles Darwin famously described variation in the anatomy of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Alfred Russel Wallace noted the similarities and differences between nearby species and those separated by natural boundaries in the Amazon and Indonesia. Independently they came to the same conclusion: over generations, natural selection of inherited traits could give rise to new species.

Use the resources below to teach the theory of evolution in your classroom. An adaptation is any heritable trait that helps an organism, such as a plant or animal, survive and reproduce in its environment.

Meet the African lungfish, a prehistoric fish that travels through water and mud, and across land. Discover the unique adaptations that make survival possible for this fish. Some traits, on the other hand, lose their function when other adaptations become more important or when the environment changes. Evidence of these traits remain in a vestigial form — reduced or functionless.

Whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones, the remains of an adaptation legs that their ancestors used to walk. A famous example of an animal adapting to a change in its environment is England's peppered moth Biston betularia. Prior to the 19 th century, the most common type of this moth was cream-colored with darker spots. Few peppered moths were gray or black. As the Industrial Revolution changed the environment, the appearance of the peppered moth changed.

The darker-colored moths, which were rare, began to thrive in the urban atmosphere. Their sooty color blended in with the trees, which were stained by industrial pollution. The cream-colored moths began to make a comeback after the United Kingdom passed laws that limited air pollution. Speciation Sometimes, an adaptation or set of adaptations develops that splits one species into two. This process is known as speciation. Marsupials in Oceania are an example of adaptive radiation , a type of speciation in which species develop to fill a variety of empty ecological niches.

Marsupials, mammals that carry their developing young in pouches after a short pregnancy, arrived in Oceania before the land split from Asia. Koalas Phascolarctos cinereus , for instance, adapted to feed on eucalyptus trees, which are native to Australia. The extinct Tasmanian tiger Thylacinus cynocephalus was a carnivorous marsupial and adapted to the niche filled by big cats, like tigers, on other continents.

Sympatric speciation is the opposite of physical isolation. It happens when species share the same habitat. Adaptations have allowed hundreds of varieties of cichlids to live in Lake Malawi. Each species of cichlid has a unique , specialized diet : One type of cichlid may eat only insects, another may eat only algae , another may feed only on other fish.

Coadaptation Organisms sometimes adapt with and to other organisms. This is called coadaptation. Certain flowers produce nectar to appeal to hummingbirds. Hummingbirds, in turn, have adapted long, thin beaks to extract the nectar from certain flowers. When a hummingbird goes to feed, it inadvertently picks up pollen from the anthers of the flowers, which is deposited on the stigma of the next flowers it visits.

The coadaptation is beneficial to both organisms. Mimicry is another type of coadaptation. In mimicry, one organism has adapted to resemble another. The harmless king snake sometimes called a milk snake has adapted a color pattern that resembles the deadly coral snake. This mimicry keeps predators away from the king snake. The mimic octopus Thaumoctopus mimicus has behavioral as well as structural adaptations.